When Christmas Lights are Blue Page 4

  But I couldn’t, not even for him, and when we arrived at the scene—which was as bad as any you might care to imagine, the very outside edge of it the brightly-wrapped presents getting mashed by oncoming traffic into the slush—I snapped. I went through my triage. I made sure, stopping at each car in turn, that there was absolutely fuck-all I could do for any of their occupants, and then I went behind the van and sat down hard in the snow.

  Karan’s shadow touched me. The shadow was threefold, cast by his sturdy figure in the triple-bulb streetlight. Somehow it was warm. “Robbie, sweetheart,” he said, his voice breaking, and he reached for me.

  I knocked his arm away. “Fuck off out of here. Leave me alone.”

  ***

  He’d walked away. We’d barely spoken for the rest of our shift, and then in the van outside Hollyford, he’d turned to me. For a moment hope had flared in me: that his sweet, forgiving nature might somehow have swallowed even this. But his eyes were bleak with pain. “I can’t do this anymore, Rob. I don’t even know how.”

  Chapter Five

  In the house in the forest, Queenie opened her eyes. “Ah,” she said benignly. “You’ve seen it all now, have you? Then it’s time for you to go.”

  That was just what I wouldn’t do. I closed the album up and laid it on the table. Yes, I’d seen it all. I’d understood, on the brink of losing everything, what I’d been about to throw away. “Not a chance,” I said. “Another ambulance will get here any minute now. Until they do, we’re gonna stay right here and look after you.”

  “Well, you say we, dear. But you know that you’re all on your own.”

  Empty space beside me on the sofa. I felt the chill of it, just as I’d felt the warmth of Karan’s shadow in the snow. I jolted round to see. “My friend was here,” I said faintly, then because she raised her eyebrows at me in evident disappointment, I reached for the truth. “My boyfriend. My fiancé. Where did he go?”

  “Nowhere. He was never really here.”

  A far-off warning of panic clenched my stomach. “He was just sitting beside me. You talked to him.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Doesn’t mean he was really here. Or that you were, or that I was.”

  Okay. She was nuts. That only increased my obligation to take care of her. The needs of the frail and the injured had started to feel like whiplash stings on my soul, but this was what I’d worked for, what I loved. Between them, Karan and the job were my whole life. Surely I’d realised that in time. “I want to go outside and find him. Will you be all right for a minute on your own?”

  “I think I’d better come with you, dear.”

  “No, stay here. It’s freezing out in the hall.”

  “No wonder, when it doesn’t have a roof. Take me with you. I might fall out of my chair otherwise. Crack my head open on the grate, set myself on fire. You wouldn’t want that.”

  “Er... no. I don’t suppose I would.” I levered myself up off the sofa, wondering why every muscle in my body protested, as if I’d spent the afternoon at the bottom of a rugby scrum. Reluctantly I offered Queenie my arm. “Come on, then. But we’ll have to find you your coat and some boots.”

  Crazy as she was, she turned out to be right about the roof. I opened the living-room door for her, then tugged her sharply back to shield her from the wild impossibility beyond. One jagged rafter remained, cutting across the starlight. The night wind sliced like a knife through the open space. Snow was drifting across the burnt remains of the floor. I tried to steady her, but she was set more firmly on her feet than I was by now. She got hold of my hand and squeezed it. “Don’t be scared.”

  “I don’t understand. This was fine when I came in. Does this mean I’m crazy too?”

  “No. Just different now.” She frowned, examining my face. “I really think it’s time for you to go. I’m sorry. You could have had such a nice life.”

  “Could have?” This was insane. She was going to freeze to death in the knifing wind, or I was. “You don’t understand. I want the life. I want Karan.”

  “Do you want to see what happened?”

  “To... To him?”

  “No, no, dear. To open up the gate. This is a gateway night, this old long one, and that’s when something fell on my house. Listen—here it comes.”

  The roof sealed itself up over our heads. The wind stopped. There was only friendly light from the ceiling bulb in its pink lampshade, and a terrible shrieking roar. “What the hell is that?”

  She was terrified now. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I ran when I heard it the first time. I ran into the old porch. It’s made out of big lumps of stone, the same ones they used to build Hadrian’s Wall. That’s what my son said to me. He said I should take shelter there, if there was ever an earthquake. He’d been watching a programme on TV.”

  “But this isn’t an earthquake. It’s—”

  “Something falling from the sky. He was only having his joke, but I remembered, and I ran.” She began to back away from me, tugging at my hand. “Run!”

  I followed her helplessly. At the last second, instinct flared up in me, and I grabbed her and half-lifted her into the shelter of the porch. I braced my arms to the wall and made a pitiful last-ditch shield of my body, and she cringed underneath me as the firebomb hit.

  Her son had been right about the porch. I kept my brow pressed to the stone as the roar and the rattle of tumbling masonry died. Whin, this particular granite was called. An outcrop of it crossed my homeland from Bamburgh to Carlisle: the dragon’s spine, carrying the ancient Wall from coast to coast. “Fucking hell,” I breathed, forgetting my company. “Oh. Sorry. But... what the fucking hell was that?”

  “The thing that fell on my house. I did warn you.” She straightened up, matter-of-factly dusting herself off. “There. All over now—unless you want to see it again.”

  “What? No!” I surveyed the ruins of the cottage. Everything was gone—not just the hallway but the rooms beyond it, a demolition site luridly picked out in patches of flame. “How could anyone survive that?”

  “Well, they didn’t, did they? They couldn’t, of course—poor things, poor things.” She dabbed her eyes on the sleeve of her glittery sweater. “You must promise to find Ron and Catherine for me, Robbie. Can you do that?”

  “I want to. I’ll do anything I can to help. But I don’t know who they are.”

  “You will. Did it ever occur to you to have a little faith?”

  No, nothing like that had ever occurred to me. Life was hard graft, and people died young. I’d gritted my teeth years ago and forged head-down into that arrangement. The one inexplicable miracle that had happened in my life was gone, and who could blame him? “I’ll try,” I said, my throat squeezing tight with smoke and grief. “But I don’t think I can do it without Karan. Can’t you tell me where he’s gone?”

  “You have to find him, too. I might have been a little ahead of myself when I said it was time for you to go—with me, anyway.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Oh, dear. Use your imagination a bit, young man.”

  “Wait. Am I meant to believe you’re some kind of ghost?”

  “Look who’s talking,” she said. She darted round behind me and gave me a shove. And I walked through the wall.

  Chapter Six

  “Robbie? Robbie! Oh, my God. Rob!”

  I knew that voice. I knew it better than any other. I’d never heard it fractured by terror before, that was all. That was why it was taking me so long to respond. Karan never yelled and wept. I’d often thought that I wouldn’t mind, if it had been me lying under a bus, or laid out on a kerb with my heart misfiring, stuttering down to a stop. If his was the last voice I would ever hear.

  If it was me behind the wheel of a car. Those were the vast majority of our callouts—RTAs, a nice bloodless acronym for hell. We were city paramedics, with long stretches of dangerous road running through our turf. And, taking it day for day, driving was the most dangerous activity modern humans rout
inely undertook. There was a price tag on that, and Karan and I had been there at the checkout times past counting. He would crouch in the wreckage, cradling the latest wounded head in his hands, assuring his victims they’d be fine even when it was horribly obvious that he was lying, because what did it matter then? His calm, low voice, a note of pure Karanji honey in it: affection, as if he’d known this latest stranger for years. He didn’t panic or shout.

  But somebody was doing both, and it wasn’t me. I cranked my eyes open. I saw for one second what looked like spiderwebs in glass. Then a plastic sheet blocked my view. I coughed at the raw, rubbery smell of it: one of our shields from the van, the things we used to protect eyes and faces before we bashed a windscreen in. Promptly came the smash. Shards pattered onto the plastic, and then the shield vanished and Karan was staring into my face.

  He was bleeding from half a dozen cuts on his own. That was weird, but stranger still was his position—ninety degrees from vertical, somehow perched on the bonnet of the van. Up to his hips in snow. I’d never seen a lovelier sight in my life. “Karanji,” I rasped. “Sweetheart.”

  “Oh, my God. Robbie! Screw you, fuck you, damn you. What’ve you done?!”

  I should’ve known that the first time round was a dream. He’d taken it all far too well. He’d never smiled and lifted me effortlessly out of the wreck, and he couldn’t do it now because I hadn’t miraculously dropped the ambulance into merciful, pillowing snow. I’d slewed her off the road, smashed her nose into a tree, and slammed her onto her side on a pitching slope in the dark. He wasn’t at a ninety-degree angle: I was. The only good aspect to all this was that I’d hit the tree on my own side, and trapped myself, not him.

  That, and the golden light streaming through the trees. That was what Karan meant, he’d told me once, when we were still finding out such things about each other. First ray of the dawn. Oh, he was my first light, even streaked with blood and tears—first, last, only. I tried to reach for him.

  “Stay still! Hold still.”

  There were other lights too. I could see them on the broken surface of the snow, darting and spinning, red and blue. I thought they might be just our own, useless signals from the ruined van, but Karan jerked his head up and waved frantically at someone further upslope. “Phil, for God’s sake, get the cutters down here—the van’s gonna roll!”

  The only Phil I knew was a fireman. Sure enough, a siren was meshing with the rush of the wind in the trees, deeper and throatier than the ambulance wail. I thought so, anyway—Kaz always said the two sounds were too similar to distinguish. I knew I was right this time, and I’d just drawn breath to say I told you so when the fog in my head cleared, and I understood with crystalline perfection what was going on. I was trapped in the van. The roof was lower than the wheels, and any moment now, five tons of Mercedes hardware was about to upend itself and flip base-over-lid into the ravine I’d noticed in a pop-bulb flash before leaving the road.

  That was fair enough—if ever a gold-plated twat deserved his comeuppance, it was me—but Karan would try to come too. Khaki-clad legs with reflective ankle strips flashed across my field of vision. Phil and three of his crew thumped down into the snow beside Karan. A blazing flashlight shone into the cabin, putting the newborn sun to shame. “Hi, Rob,” Phil said cheerfully, as if he’d just bumped into me in the pub. “This is one of the new Merc vans, isn’t it? Mackie’s gonna be docking your pay for the rest of your life.”

  “Never mind that. Get Karan out of here.”

  “I would, but we kind of need him just now. Kaz, hold his head out of the way while we get the spreaders in there. Ali, Rachel, make sure the hydraulic ram’s ready to go as soon as we can reach in. We’ll have to brace it off the dash and the panel behind him—the wheel housing’s got him pinned tight.”

  “Nope. No. Make him go.” I couldn’t move, but I had weapons. A paperclip had fallen into a crack on the crumpled dash. I threw that at Karan, then a screwed-up petrol receipt. I was reaching for a biro when he seized my arm. He didn’t wait for the spreaders to begin their work on the top and bottom edge of the screen: crawled in through the glass-toothed gap and took me in an immobilising grip. “Got you,” he said, his breath against my ear the only warmth in the world. “Jesus, Rob. You’ve been out cold for hours. I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You should lose me. I don’t deserve you. Please get out of here.”

  “Not a chance. Never.”

  I gave up. I should have spent my last strength pushing him away, but I wasn’t unselfish enough. The cold nose of the hydraulic ram came probing into the cabin, and at Phil’s shouted command I took hold of it and began helping Karan find a place to secure it against the wheel housing. Once that was done, I grabbed him and took him into my arms, as hard and tight as he was holding me. “You have to find Queenie,” I said. “She was in the house when the sky fell. We hid in the porch, but she’s got to be injured. And we have to find Ron and Catherine.”

  “Oh, darlin’. You’ve banged your head.”

  “What comes after the last page? I can’t see, Kaz. I’m so cold.”

  “I know. I know. But just hold on.”

  Chapter Seven

  The ward was quiet, in the first hour after nightfall on Christmas Eve. I knew this hiatus. I sat up in bed, following the sweep of the second hand on my handsome watch. There’d be a lull, while the last of the office workers finished their day and closed up shop. A couple of hours, long enough for everyone to get home, get dressed in their finery, come back into town and have their first couple of drinks, civilised and sociable and merry. Then the city would explode, sending waves of alcohol poisoning, brawls and suicide bids across its weary population. The hospitals were braced for impact.

  The most wonderful time of the year. It was, for me. Music drifted up the corridor from the nurses’ station. Karanji appeared in the doorway, a paper cup in each hand. He made his careful way to my bedside and sat down. “Snitched this for you. Mulled wine, perfectly safe to be consumed on duty. Cheers.”

  I took one cup and bumped it gently off his. He was in uniform, stealing twenty minutes from the festive shifts he’d promised Mackie. Every waking minute of his off-duty, he’d found his way to me, first in the ICU and then, when the swelling in my brain had come down, this backwater side-ward where my broken leg was knitting itself up beneath its protective cage. The wine might be alcohol free, but it was hot, full of herbs and spices, and it went straight to my head. I grinned. “God, I love you.”

  “Shush, you great indiscreet lump.” He wasn’t much of an advert for discretion: made a move to plump my pillows and stopped halfway for a kiss. “I love you too. I’ve, er... had a word with my dad about Vishram.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t easy. I was brought up not to sneak, you know? But my parents live with their heads in the clouds. They couldn’t see how he was changing.”

  “What happened?”

  “The professor came down from the clouds. He’s a nice dad—the best—but you don’t want to piss him off. Vishram is going for a good long stay on our uncle’s estate farm, to work hard and stay out of mischief. Which is not to say that I don’t understand him.”

  I nodded, careful not to pull the stitches under my chin. “Which is not to say that I don’t.”

  “A lot of this started for him when he had to come and visit me right here, after that mess at the Scotsbridge estate. I do know where he’s coming from. But a Sikh who engages in violence isn’t a Sikh anymore, and a brother who threatens my Robbie—”

  “Don’t. Don’t say that. I told you, it wasn’t a threat against me.”

  “And I told you, defending me against him’s not your job. It’s my father’s, and he’s done it.” Karan sat back a little, though he didn’t let go of my hand. “The weird thing is, I do need you to defend me elsewhere. I can cope with getting bricks lobbed at me. I can even cope with Vish and his psychotic notions of honour. But...”

  “
But not with my dad.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve let him say what he likes to you, just because I’ve always seen him as this poor old drunk who can’t help himself. I’ve even let him do it in our own home.”

  “Ah, Robbie.” He searched around among the water glasses and books on my table, then gave up and pulled a crumpled paper napkin from his pocket. Carefully he dabbed my face. “They won’t let me visit if I upset you. I know how things are with your dad, okay? Forget about him.”

  “Oh, hell, no. He’s not just a poor old drunk—he’s a dick. And he can help himself, and so can I, and I swear to you, Kaz, it’ll never happen again.”

  “All right. All right.” He planted another kiss on my brow. “I wonder if the world would end if we just....”

  “What? Please tell me.”

  “Well—I had a word with Dr Gilbert on my way in. She says you might be ready for discharge tomorrow. What if we just had Christmas on our own?”

  “Sounds like bloody paradise.”

  “Wouldn’t your family freak?”

  “Let ’em. It’s been five years, us faithfully traipsing over there to eat Greggs mince pies and stare at the telly.” Reality caught up with me, a chilly tug on my sleeve. “We can’t, though, can we? You’re working.”