8:05 a.m., Friday, October 27
They were approaching the house, there within six minutes of the call. It was the very start of her day and, already, something grim awaited. An unconscious baby, the operator told her. Her skin was white. Not breathing, no pulse. CPR being performed. It didn’t sound good.
Natalie had a head cold. It had kept her up for most of the night. In the end, at four o’clock, Adam had made her up a bowl of Vicks, just like her mother used to do for her.
But she wasn’t fuzzy-headed any longer. She was completely and utterly alert. An unresponsive baby. Adrenaline pulsed through her body.
The house was tall and slim. They abandoned the ambulance on the drive and opened the door. Immediately, Natalie could hear the commotion upstairs.
“Oh God, oh God, come on, Layla,” a woman was shouting. Natalie ran up the stairs. The nursery was the first door on the right. Her eyes were on the baby, and the woman who she presumed to be the mother. Her colleague saw the other child, the nine-year-old, tearstained and standing outside the bedroom, peering in horror at his mother, and took him downstairs.
They didn’t call the deaths of babies. That was Natalie’s immediate thought when she saw the body. And, later, she wished she hadn’t had it, that she hadn’t been so pessimistic. Would she have done anything differently, she thought, later? No. She wouldn’t. She knew she wouldn’t, and yet . . . she couldn’t help but relive it again, just to see.
That baby. Natalie stood on the landing and stared at it, for just a second. You learned to spot it. You learned to spot the signs. Not blue, as she would have presumed when she first started out in the job. Not blue, no: white. Floppy.
The room was almost empty: a makeshift nursery, it looked like. A Moses basket. A chest of drawers. A faded carpet, worn in patches in the middle of the room and good as new at the edges.
Natalie was measuring doses and felt a lurch of sympathy and wished she could tell the mother, then. To save her the hope of the resuscitation, of the ambulance journey, of the cold, sterile resus room in A&E, the doctor’s somber expression and, finally, the baby being wheeled away to the morgue. They could do it now; a black body bag might be kinder, in a way. But she couldn’t: The list of deaths she could call was minuscule. Dead on arrival: It was the doctor’s job.
It was rhythmic. Natalie moved in. The airbag. The adrenaline. It came naturally to her. But the whole time, she was thinking: This is futile. Absolutely futile.
Natalie glanced at the mother. She was ashen, a tissue clutched in her fist, brought up to her face. She was shivering violently, pulling a cardigan around herself as she turned and closed the bedroom window. The sound of it closing seemed to reverberate around the bedroom.
The finality of it.