‘Lie him down,’ I ordered. ‘We need to apply pressure.’
I pulled off my own polo shirt, made it into a ball, and then held it very tightly against the wound. Darren moaned as I did so, from the pain.
‘Sorry,’ I said to him, pushing hard against him. ‘It needs to be done to stop the bleeding. Otherwise you’ll bleed to death.’
Amanda and I laid him down, and I used my weight to push down even harder. He stared up at me with wide, frightened eyes, and with good reason.
The initial rate of bleeding suggested that the knife had punctured something critical, perhaps his liver or one of the blood vessels connected to it. Without the pressure, he would bleed out in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds. But what he also needed now, and urgently, was proper medical help.
‘James,’ I shouted, turning my head towards him. ‘Call an ambulance. And the police.’
He hesitated, instead looking out the sitting room window towards the gateway onto the road through which his friend was driving away at high speed.
‘James, do it now!’
‘I’ve already called them,’ Patrick said. ‘They’re on their way.’
He still held his phone, and I suddenly realised that he had been filming everything that had been going on. He saw me looking at him and shrugged.
‘Evidence,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’
Amanda kneeled down beside Darren and stroked his forehead.
‘You’re my hero,’ she said to him.
He tried to smile at her, but he was clearly in great pain and in shock. His face was very pale.
‘But he will be all right, won’t he?’ Amanda asked, looking across at me, searching for some reassurance.
I didn’t like to tell her that it depended on how long the ambulance took to arrive, but she could probably read that in my face.
I knew that, in spite of the external pressure, Darren would still be bleeding internally, and much would depend on how much blood he was losing into his abdominal cavity. If it was too much and it couldn’t be replaced in time, it might result in not enough oxygen getting to his organs, and his body would begin to shut down.
I looked down at him.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘Yet I’m sweating.’
I thought sweating was not a good sign.
Keeping the pressure on Darren’s abdomen with one hand, I reached for his wrist with the other. His pulse seemed strong enough, but it was very rapid, and I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I was just thankful that there was a pulse at all.
‘Where’s the bloody ambulance?’ I asked of no one in particular.
It had probably only been two or three minutes since Darren had been stabbed, but it felt more like half an hour.
Indeed, time in that room seemed to have almost stopped altogether.
James went on staring out the window, perhaps contemplating the disastrous mess that he was now part of, while Amanda remained kneeling on the floor next to Darren, stroking his forehead and constantly telling him how sorry she was.
And Georgina had recovered her composure.
‘I think I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said, standing up from the sofa as if nothing had happened and there wasn’t a young man quite likely bleeding to death on her sitting-room floor. It was as if she had blocked out everything.
She didn’t quite have to step over Darren’s prostrate body to reach the door on her way to the kitchen, but it was a close-run thing.
Meanwhile, Patrick continued filming.
We all heard the ambulance’s siren long before it arrived.
‘James,’ I said, ‘go out and meet them. To make sure they get the right house.’
He didn’t move but went on looking out the window.
‘James!’
He slowly turned his head to face me, but there was a rather disturbing blankness in his eyes, as if he didn’t care about anything anymore.
‘Go outside and meet the ambulance,’ I said. ‘Show them where to come.’
With clear reluctance, he dragged himself off the back of the armchair on which he’d been perching, and walked out of the house, hardly giving Darren a second glance.
I looked down.
If anything, Darren had gone even paler, and I felt we were getting close to losing him.
‘Stay with us, Darren,’ I said urgently. ‘Keep awake. Don’t go to sleep.’
Amanda looked up at me with increasing dread, and perhaps for the first time, I realised how much she cared for him.
The siren came much closer, filling the house with noise. Then it stopped.
Two ambulance men in green uniforms came running in, each carrying a large red backpack. They went down on their knees, one on each side of the patient, while Amanda stood up. I remained where I was, still pushing down on Darren with my ball of polo shirt.
‘He’s been stabbed in the abdomen,’ I said. ‘Initially there was a lot of blood, but I’ve been applying pressure now for about ten minutes.’
‘Is the knife still in him?’ one of them asked as he started removing equipment from his backpack.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Do you know if he has any other injuries? Was he hit with something, or was there anything else done to him that could have broken any bones? Or did he hit his head on the floor when going down.’
I shook my own head. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just the single stab wound.’
‘Right. You keep up the pressure on that while we assess him.’
He slipped a blood-pressure cuff over Darren’s right arm and placed a large clip on his index finger while his colleague put a cannula into the back of his other hand.
‘How much blood did he lose?’ asked the other one.
‘What you can see.’
But Darren was lying in most of it.
‘More or less than if you’d broken a bottle of red wine on the floor?’
‘About the same, maybe a bit more. But that’s only externally. There’s probably quite a lot more inside him.’
‘Eighty over forty-seven,’ one of them said, reading it off the blood-pressure monitor. ‘Too low. And oxygen saturation is less than ninety per cent. He urgently needs some intravenous fluid.’
I watched as he reached into his bag and pulled out a large transparent bag of liquid, with a plastic tube attached.
‘Saline,’ he said, connecting the tube to the cannula in Darren’s hand. ‘Not as good as whole blood, but it’s all we’ve got.’
He held the bag up and squeezed it to speed up the transfer of the liquid into Darren.
‘Now it’s time to blue-light this chap to hospital. He’ll need immediate surgery to stop the internal bleeding.’
His colleague went out and returned with a stretcher, a high-tech black and yellow contraption on wheels, which he positioned alongside Darren. The two ambulance men then moved so that one was at his head, the other at his feet.
‘All right, ease the pressure slightly as we lift him. One, two, three — lift.’
Grabbing his shoulders and his ankles, they lifted Darren easily onto the stretcher.
‘Thank you,’ said one paramedic to me. ‘I’ll take over the pressure now.’
I lifted my saturated polo shirt off Darren. Blood immediately started to leak out of the wound, but not as fast as before. The paramedic replaced my shirt with a large sterile pad, to which he applied pressure with a blue-gloved hand.
Far more hygienic.
The other one hung the saline drip on a pole attached to the stretcher, before placing a bright red cellular blanket across Darren’s legs and feet. I wondered if ambulance blankets were coloured red so that you couldn’t see the blood.
Together the two men wheeled the stretcher quickly out of the house, and then up the ramp into the ambulance, while Amanda and I followed with the rest of their equipment.