Page 103 of Such a Good Couple
‘Emergency services.’ A voice spoke into Annie’s ear.
‘I need an ambulance.’
‘Okay. I’m putting you through to the ambulance control room. Try to stay calm.’
Another voice came on the line. ‘What address are you at? What is your emergency?’
Annie gave the Eircode of the Miavita house and then somehow managed to assemble the words to describe the horror laid out before her.
‘Okay, the call has been put through,’ the responder said. ‘I have also contacted the local community first responders. They might be with you before the ambulance. They’re civilian volunteers but they have training and some equipment.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gardaí are also en route. I can stay on the line until someone arrives. Do you know how to do CPR? I’ll talk you through it.’
CPR. Of course. I should have been doing CPR the second I saw her.Annie had a terrible sense that she was doing everything wrong.
She put the phone on speaker beside her and pulled Maggie onto her back. She listened to the woman’s instruction, trying to ignore the mottled skin on the side of Maggie’s face that had been pressed to the tiles. Annie started to feel sick but got up on her knees to push down on Maggie’s chest.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Maggie,’ she gasped between sobs and compressions. ‘Please stay, please stay.’ Next she sealed her lips to her friend’s and blew as hard as she could.
In her heart, she knew that Clara had been right, they were too late. Maggie was dead. She had been dead since before they’d pulled those balloons out of the car.
Still Annie kept going until, eventually, unseen hands gently but firmly moved her out of the bathroom. She lay rag-dolled against the wall a few feet from the door and watched these strangers, a man and a woman, take over. They continued the CPR but Annie detected a sense of going through the motions as they exchanged glances and whispered quietly to each other. They were all too late. Annie shook with sobs as images of Maggie visited her. Maggie young, Maggie pregnant, Maggie laughing, tipsy with red-wine teeth, Maggie smelling her babies’ heads and tickling them as toddlers in the garden. The sweetness of these glimpses was unbearably cruel.
Regrets flooded Annie so fast they were hard to parse.
We should have gone straight upstairs. We should have come last night. I should have gotten Essie downstairs faster. I should have …
More medics arrived and she shifted further away. The scene seemed to hurtle around her and she closed her eyes and tried to breathe but her lungs seemed only capable of contracting weakly.
Time passed and in Annie’s disturbed state it could have been seconds or hours. A woman in a white shirt with a walkie-talkie clipped to her waist knelt in front of her.
‘Can I help you downstairs?’
Annie nodded faintly and slowly got to her feet. She felt like she’d been in a state of suspended animation, though for how long she wasn’t sure. Through the door of the bathroom, Annie could see the place where Maggie had lain. Maggie was nowhere; they had already taken her. Now the tiles were too pristine. The room looked impossibly perfect as though nothing had taken place at all. Annie shuffled forward across the landing, struck bythe strange ordinariness of having to put one foot in front of the other when it felt like everything had just ended.
Down in the hall, Annie could see Dodi sitting in an antique chair, knuckles white as she gripped the seat, her legs dangling a foot above the floor. The guards had arrived, as had Ollie, who held Essie in his arms as he stood beside Clara’s still and silent form. Conor appeared from the kitchen carrying cups of tea, followed by Rachel who held the milk jug and biscuits.
Every one of them turned to watch Annie and she understood then that she was descending into an irrevocably changed world, a new and awful nightmare without end.
Maggie. You’re gone. And it’s my fault, I didn’t save you.
CHAPTER 26
The night before Maggie’s funeral, Clara opened Slags For Life. By an unspoken agreement, she and Annie had continued to communicate in the group chat. The thought of going over to their thread just felt too awful, like they were leaving Maggie, abandoning her. There was also comfort, however heartbreaking, in scrolling up in the chat and seeing Maggie’s last happy messages.
Clara tapped out a pathetic plea.
Clara: Can you come over? I’m not okay.
Annie’s reply was mercifully quick.
Annie: On my way.
Clara lay back down on her bed where she had spent most of the last four days since the worst day of her life. The rain beat relentlessly on the black square of the attic skylight above and she felt a twinge of guilt. Dragging her pregnant friend over felt selfish, but the awful truth was that since that devastating Saturday morning, she’d been having near-continuous panic attacks and she was scared to drive.
Just thinking about the panic attacks felt dangerous because she suspected just thinking about it could summon them.
