‘Damn and blast,’ Felix mutters, tears in her eyes. She’s gashed her shin again on the corner of a metal bed. They’re impossible to avoid in the dark. Blood trickles down. ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’
She doesn’t look at the face of the man lying on the operating table under a gently swinging light bulb. The barber is in the way, shaving the wound area. And anyway, Felix has to sort out the instruments she’s just collected from the steriliser, and lay out the swabs.
Doug radios down to the transfusion lorry to see how supplies are doing. He runs a hand over his bristly chin, as if thinking he wouldn’t mind a shave himself.
‘No good. They’re completely out of bottled blood.’
He raises his eyebrows at her in a question that doesn’t need asking.
The operating table is too high for Felix to plonk herself down on the ground as she usually does, legs outstretched, grateful for a break. Instead she manoeuvres a chair over with one crooked foot and sits with her arm extended. It’s the first blood she’s given so far that day. She’s always happy to do it. Nothing else makes her feel so useful.
She closes her eyes. Doug finds the syringe, and asks for saline. She is just like a horse, Felix thinks. She can practically sleep standing up. But as the needle pierces her vein, she forces her lids open again. She can’t miss this moment. It’s the best bit. When you watch their faces change and life start up again. It makes you feel alive yourself.
This face is grey like all the others. She expected that. But not to know it. Not to cry out and make the others stare. Felix leaps up, cannula still in her arm. The chair clatters to the floor behind her, and Nat’s eyelids flicker, but do not open.
‘Steady on,’ says Doug. The anaesthetist checks the two-way syringe and the double tube joining Felix to Nat. Still in place. He rescues the chair. ‘Steady on.’
All the blood in her body seems to leave at once, in a great tidal wave. Felix feels giddy and light and terribly sick. She hears a voice.
‘It’s too much. She’s going to pass out. Have you got her? Make her sit down. Get her tea. Plenty of sugar.’
‘I’m fine,’ she protests. ‘Sorry. Sorry. I know him. That’s all. I know him.’
Then she sees it happen. Nat’s face begins to colour. She reaches for his neck with her free hand, holding three gentle fingers against a pulse that steadily gains in strength.
‘Come on. Come on.’
She can will life back into him. She will make his pulse beat time with her own.
For fifteen minutes after the transfusion they chart Nat’s vital signs. Felix finds it unbearable, the wait before Doug can get to work on him. When she feels the surgeon’s eyes on her, she looks up, dreading the news.
‘Well?’
‘I can’t say yet. Depends what we find. You know that. But let’s get a move on. He’s a good friend, is he? Are you really up to this, Felix?’
‘Of course.’
Felix would rather be looking right into Nat’s guts and know what is happening there than be anywhere else in the world.
Eventually, still working away, Doug speaks again through his mask. ‘Right. You can see the picture. Bullet through upper left abdomen. At least it’s not shrapnel. Splenic flexure torn and spleen nicked too, so I’ll have to take that out. Resection and anastomosis first though.’
‘No sign of sepsis.’
‘No, it’s looking good.’ He gives her a quick exhausted smile, and doesn’t look away. ‘I’d say it was looking good.’
The cave begins to lighten. Felix goes back to the post-ops, Nat to recovery. She keeps watching him of course. She has to be there when he comes round.
Faintly, a few miles from their valley, the first air raid on the river is beginning. The cave’s acoustics distort distance and direction, but still this doesn’t sound close enough to worry about. Anyway, you can’t worry about everything at once. It would kill you.