A delivery van was coming down the bridge road, way too fast in the rain.
Mara put it at the top of her list. She'd started it the second she reached the street. It was the list she made on every site visit: everything here that could hurt a person.
The scaffolding on the corner building, wrapped in plastic sheeting that had come loose at one edge.
A crane two streets away. It wasn't moving, but a crane didn't have to be moving to drop a load.
A cyclist riding on the sidewalk.
The curb.
His shoes. Old leather, worn smooth on the bottom. Terrible shoes for wet stone.
'And then what? What am I supposed to do, tackle him?'
The man stopped at the crosswalk. He stood right on the edge of the curb, in a hurry like everyone else.
The van was coming.
Mara saw it before he did. She took one step forward and froze, with no idea what she was going to shout.
His phone rang.
He stepped back from the curb to answer it. The van went past close enough to blow his jacket open, and carried on down the road.
In the glass of the bus shelter beside him, the numbers kept going.
[00:02:31]
'So it's not the van... okay. Okay.'
"No, I'm on the bridge road," the man said into his phone. "Yes. Yes, I know. Tell her I said that."
He laughed at whatever the caller said next. It was a nice laugh, big and easy.
That was the moment Mara wanted, very badly, to turn around and walk away.
She stayed where she was, three steps behind him.
He put the phone away, finished the last of his coffee, and dropped the empty cup in a trash can by the corner. He walked into the bakery beside it. Mara went in after him.
She stood by the door and pretended to read the menu board. She read the word manakish four times, and never took it in.
Behind the counter ran a long strip of polished steel. The man was in it too, stretched sideways like a face in a spoon, and the numbers were still above his head.
[00:01:57]
"Coffee, please," he said to the girl at the counter. "Medium. One sugar."
"Anything to eat with it?"
"Not today."
He counted out coins.
Mara's hands were shaking.
'Check the room. If it's anything, it's in here.'
The ovens. The gas pipe behind them. A wet patch on the floor by the door. A shelf of jars above the counter.
Nothing was falling. Nothing was on fire. Behind her, a woman was politely arguing about the price of cheese pies.
The man took his cup.
[00:01:20]
Mara was still standing in the doorway. He reached past her and held the door open.
"After you," he said.
"Sorry," Mara said, and went out ahead of him.
Out on the sidewalk, she checked everything. The road, the roofs, the loose sheeting, the people under their umbrellas.
'Where is it... where IS it?'
Nothing was coming. It was a wet street on a Tuesday morning.
The man stopped under the bakery's awning to pull the lid off his cup. The bakery window had both of them in it. The man with his coffee, and Mara a few steps away with her bag held in front of her. Above her own head in the glass, there was only a string of paper lanterns.
Above his, there was this.
[00:01:04]
'Tell him to sit down. Tell him something is wrong. Say it!'
She opened her mouth, and nothing came out.
With fifty-nine seconds left on the count, he lifted the cup to take a sip.
He stopped with the cup still at his mouth.
His face went blank.
The cup fell. Mara heard it hit the stone, and she was already moving. She caught his arm.
"Sir? Sir!"
He turned his face to her from very close. She didn't think he could see her.
His knees went. She couldn't hold him. He was far too heavy, and they went down together, him on his side and her on one hip on the wet sidewalk.
"Somebody call an ambulance!"
Somebody did. Behind her, a man gave the street name twice, loudly, the way people do when they're scared.
Mara rolled him onto his back the way the first aid course had taught her. Tilt the head back to open the airway.
His eyes were open.
His chest rose twice. Two long breaths, with a pause after each one that went on far too long.
After the second one, his chest stopped moving.
She put two fingers on the side of his throat, under the jaw, and counted. There was nothing under her fingers. She moved them, in case she had the wrong spot, and counted again.
Nothing.
'You have a certificate for this. It's in a drawer at home. You've never used it... use it now.'
She put the heel of one hand in the middle of his chest and the other hand on top. She locked her elbows and pushed.
A real chest was nothing like the dummy.
The dummy in the course gave a little click when you pushed deep enough. A real chest went down further than she was ready for, and it made a sound. On the fourth push, she felt one of his ribs crack.
She kept going anyway. They'd warned the class about that too.
"I'm a nurse. Move."
A woman in a blue raincoat was down on her knees on his other side. She'd dropped a shopping bag to get there, and two apples had rolled into the gutter. Mara moved. The nurse put her hands where Mara's had been and pushed, hard and fast, counting out loud.
Mara sat back on her heels. Her jeans were wet through at the knees. She held her hands up in front of her and had no idea what to do with them now.
The bakery window was right behind the nurse.
'Look. Go on, look at it.'
The man was in the glass, flat on his back. The nurse was bent over him, and all around them were legs and wet umbrellas and somebody's dog on a leash.
[00:00:09]
"Come on," the nurse said, every time she pushed down. "Come on. Come on."
[00:00:05]
[00:00:03]
[00:00:02]
[00:00:01]
[00:00:00]
The numbers were gone. Over his head in the glass there was only the string of paper lanterns.
The nurse kept going. Why would she stop? She couldn't see it.
It was six minutes before the ambulance got there.
Two paramedics pushed through the crowd, and the nurse sat back to let them in. They cut his shirt open, stuck two pads on his chest, and took over the pushing. They put a tube down his throat and squeezed a bag on the end of it.
They worked on him on the sidewalk for nine minutes. They lifted him into the ambulance and kept going with the back doors open.
The nurse sat down on the curb next to Mara.
"You started the compressions?" she asked.
"Yes."
"How many did you do?"
"I don't know. Not many."
"That's more than most people do." The nurse turned to her. "First time on a real person?"
Mara nodded.
"It's always worse than the dummy," the nurse said.
She didn't say anything else, and she didn't get up. They sat together and watched the back of the ambulance.
The older paramedic climbed down. He checked the second hand of his watch and said a few words to the one inside.
The pushing stopped. Nobody started it again.
He walked over to the two of them.
"You both worked on him?"
"She did," the nurse said. "I took over."
"You did it right," he said to Mara. "It wasn't going to make a difference. I'm sorry. He's gone, honey. He was gone before we got here."
Mara went over it in her head, sitting there on the curb. His heart must have stopped when he took that sip, almost a minute before zero. The count kept running while two people pushed on his chest, and it ran out anyway.
'Zero... is that when it's too late? I've only got one reading.'
Mara never found out why his heart stopped. Nobody told her, and she had no right to be told.
He drank his coffee with one sugar. He'd ridden that tram for four years and still pushed the wrong door every morning. Less than two minutes before he fell, he was laughing on the phone. His heart stopped on a wet street.
She was still sitting on the curb in the rain when they shut the ambulance doors.
In the bakery window she could see the nurse, and herself beside her with her bag on her knees. Mara checked above her own head. Only the paper lanterns.
Under the awning, with a minute still on the count, she'd had the words ready. Sit down. Two words, and she hadn't said them.
Nobody else on that street had known he was going to die. Not him, and not the nurse.
She'd known the minute.