Chapter 8 #2
‘You all right?’ Cleo murmured.
Tash nodded, then shook her head.
‘I’m still shaking all over,’ she admitted, laughing weakly. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’
‘Not at all,’ Cleo replied. ‘You’re in shock. Your body’s doing what it’s meant to do. It’ll pass.’
‘I can’t stand this helpless feeling, like it’s all going to collapse and there’s nothing I can do,’ Tash said in a small voice. ‘It was like this when Alfie died. I used to wake up in the night, shaking. It’s the same feeling now, as if the world’s turned against us and wants to destroy us all.’
Cleo touched her friend’s hand lightly, in the way she’d once comforted frightened patients.
‘The earthquake’s over now, Tash. The big one’s over. Just aftershocks now.’
Tash’s mouth twisted into a small, unsteady smile.
‘You sound like you’ve done this before.’
‘Not exactly,’ Cleo replied. ‘But I’ve been through worse nights when I worked as an emergency nurse after I’d done my training.’
Henrietta was carrying a large plastic container with the words FIRST AID on the front, which she placed on the grass near them.
Once she and Mark had done a head count and established no one was missing, Mark said he’d run back to the house to turn off the water and the main gas valve.
‘Can’t it wait till help comes?’ Henrietta pleaded. ‘It’s not safe in there.’
Mark frowned. ‘It’ll only take a minute. We can’t risk an explosion.’
He passed his wife what looked like a small, battery-operated radio.
‘Find the local station,’ he said. ‘Listen for instructions.’
Henrietta nodded dumbly. She was trying hard to stay strong, but Cleo could tell underneath she was as scared as the rest of them.
‘Earthquakes aren’t uncommon in Crete,’ she told Cleo falteringly, kneeling down with the radio on her lap. ‘But this felt like a particularly big one.’
Now, Maya joined the group, listening closely to the radio’s crackles and hums while Henrietta fiddled with the nob, searching up and down the airwaves.
‘I wonder how widespread the quake was,’ Maya said. ‘I hope they’re all right in the village.’
They were interrupted by a loud, angry voice calling for ‘the nurse’.
Lesley marched right up close to Cleo and practically shoved her nose in her face.
‘You’re the nurse, aren’t you?’ she said in an accusatory tone. ‘So why aren’t you doing your job? Fran and I have both been hurt. We need medical attention.’
Her self-centredness made Cleo’s blood boil. It was pretty clear to her straight away that the women’s injuries weren’t nearly as serious as Noreen’s, but she wasn’t going to fall out with Lesley now.
‘Poor you,’ she said fake-sweetly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come and see you in a minute. I’ll get to everyone eventually, but I need to treat Noreen first. She’s the priority.’
Lesley snorted and said something under her breath. Luckily, Cleo couldn’t hear.
‘Where is Noreen?’ she asked suddenly, scanning the crowd and eventually spotting the elderly woman sitting a little way off on the grass. Someone had wrapped a coat round her shoulders and Frida and Ingrid were keeping her company.
‘I’m going to check on her,’ she told Maya, who nodded and took over looking after Tash without a murmur, squatting beside their friend and taking her hand. Henrietta had the radio to her ear and seemed very absorbed.
Cleo hoped there would be news of a rescue operation soon; she didn’t fancy shivering on the mountain all night and more importantly, they might need to get Noreen and, possibly, some of the others to hospital.
She’d forgotten till now she was supposed to be flying back to the UK in a few hours. Obviously, this wouldn’t be happening.
Poor Noreen was clearly in a good deal of pain. Cleo concluded she’d probably fractured her wrist when she’d fallen and would certainly need medical treatment.
Her hands shook before she began work and she pressed them together hard. It wasn’t fear exactly, more a kind of shocked alertness, like the feeling she used to get when dealing with a major trauma. Adrenaline and exhaustion vied with each other for dominance.
The best she could do for now was to immobilise the injured arm in a makeshift sling and administer painkillers.
She also used a clean pad to apply gentle pressure to the open wounds on Noreen’s arms and legs to stop the bleeding.
It was little enough, but by the time Cleo had finished, Noreen seemed a bit stronger and more cheerful. It was probably the reassurance of knowing that the injury wasn’t life-threatening.
Next, Cleo moved on to Fran, then Lesley. Cleo couldn’t resist making a point of how brave Noreen was being and how lucky the sisters were to have escaped with just a few superficial scrapes.
‘Well, they hurt an awful lot for inconsequential injuries,’ Lesley said crossly. ‘Where and when did you do your nurse’s training, may I ask? Was it in the UK or somewhere else?’
Cleo completely ignored the slight.
‘Here, have a paracetamol,’ she said coolly, flipping over a box of pills. ‘A mild one should do the trick.’
Next up were Ingrid and Frida, who both insisted they were all right. But then Frida admitted she’d been struck on the head by a heavy painting, which had fallen off the wall above the bed.
‘I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you tell me?’ Ingrid demanded to know.
Frida explained she’d been groping round in the dark when it happened, searching for her phone, which had flown off the bedside table onto the floor.
‘Anyway, there was so much else going on, it didn’t seem important,’ she explained. ‘It didn’t hurt that much. To be honest, I was more worried about getting out of that place alive.’
There was quite a deep cut on her head, which was still bleeding. Cleo gave Ingrid a clean cloth and told her to apply pressure to the wound.
Frida didn’t appear concussed, but Cleo knew the symptoms could take hours or days to develop. She decided not to mention this right now, however, for fear of causing unnecessary alarm. It could wait till help arrived.
She was so busy tending to everyone, she didn’t notice Maya striding purposefully towards her, her eyes sharp and alert. Tash followed close behind.
‘Henrietta’s got through to the local news station,’ Maya announced when she was near enough. ‘It was a 6.9 earthquake, pretty big. It’s affected a wide area. I’m afraid there are likely to be deaths.’
Cleo shivered. Glancing up, she noticed the stars above were particularly brilliant, and the moon was casting a silver light on everything around. The garden looked beautiful and serene, almost mockingly so, given what had just happened.
Somewhere in the distance, the faint roar of water drifted up from the valley, shattering the peace. Cleo stood up and squinted into the darkness.
‘That’s not… right,’ she whispered to Maya, hoping Tash wouldn’t hear.
Maya stood stock-still, ears pricked. ‘I agree.’
A chilling silence followed, then Henrietta came towards them, still clutching the radio.
‘There’s severe flooding in Porto Liakáda,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Huge waves. They’ve all been told to evacuate and get to high ground. Help is on its way from Chania and the other big cities. In the meantime, we’ve been told to sit tight and try to keep warm.’