Roses Are Red - Miranda Rijks Page 0,90

collapsing onto the stone floor.

‘Mum!’ Mia screams, her face contorted with terror.

I try to speak, to tell her to get my EpiPen, but she knows what to do and she knows where we keep it. She rushes to the pull-out drawer to the left of the larder. As my breathing gets tighter, I watch her chuck the contents of the drawer onto the floor.

‘Where is it?’ she screeches, rifling manically. ‘It’s not here, Mum! Shit, it’s not here!’

‘My handbag,’ I try to say, but the words don’t come out.

‘Patrick! Patrick!’ Mia screams. ‘Where the fuck!’ She rushes out of the room and almost instantly returns with my handbag. I don’t know how she does it so quickly. She tips the contents out onto the kitchen table. ‘No! No!’ she says. My world is starting to go black, and I know I need to hang on in there. I must be strong for my children.

‘It’s not here either,’ she says. Her voice is ragged. And then she runs out of the room and I can hear her heavy footsteps. And then blackness and nothing.

‘Wake up, Mum!’ Mia is crouched over me, her face white as snow. ‘Please, Mum.’ She is crying.

‘It’s getting better.’ I try to talk, but I’m not sure if the words come out properly.

‘I couldn’t find your EpiPen, Mum. I don’t understand. It wasn’t in the kitchen or in your handbag, and I thought you had several.’

‘I do,’ I say, reaching up to hold her. She lies down on the floor next to me, her wet cheek against mine.

‘I thought you’d died, Mum. I thought I’d lost you too.’ She is crying now, her body shaking with sobs.

‘It’s all right, darling, I’m all right.’ I can feel the swelling reducing, normality returning to my aching body.

I hear footsteps.

‘What the hell! Oh my God, Lydia. Mia? What’s happened?’ Patrick crouches down on the floor next to us.

‘Mum had an allergic reaction,’ Mia says, pulling away from me. ‘I shouted for you, but you didn’t come. Why?’

‘Sorry, but I was in the shower. I didn’t hear anything.’

‘You were in the shower for a bloody long time,’ she says, pushing herself off the ground. ‘She’d have been dead if I hadn’t been here.’

‘Well, thank God for you, Mia,’ Patrick says.

‘I couldn’t find any of her EpiPens. Not here in the kitchen or in her handbag or in her bedside table. Where the hell are they?’

Patrick raises his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘So how did you save her, or did she come to by herself?’

‘Are you really that bloody ignorant?’ Mia snaps. ‘She nearly died! It’s only because I have an EpiPen that I saved her.’

‘Thank goodness you did.’ Patrick strokes my forehead. ‘How are you feeling, love?’

‘Shit, like I normally do after an anaphylactic shock,’ I say.

Patrick stands up and reaches for the phone. ‘I’m calling for an ambulance.’

‘I don’t need to–’ I say.

‘Yes, she does,’ Mia interrupts. ‘She could get a delayed anaphylactic reaction. The doctor told me about it.’

‘We need an ambulance. My wife has had an allergic reaction to something.’ He gives our address and confirms that I am able to breathe for now.

‘They’re sending an ambulance straight away. It’s an emergency, apparently.’

‘Of course it’s a bloody emergency,’ Mia says. Her eyes are streaming. ‘If I hadn’t had my own EpiPen, Mum would be dead!’

The ambulance arrives within fifteen minutes, by which time I’m feeling almost normal. Even so, Patrick suggests I remain lying on the kitchen floor. He’s found a blanket that he’s wrapped me in and has made me sip a milky, sugary tea.

The paramedics check me over, but to my disappointment, they insist I go with them to the hospital for a full check-up. So I’m bundled into the back of the ambulance, strapped to various machines.

‘I’ll follow the ambulance in my car,’ Patrick says.

‘Can you ring Cassie, get her to look after the kids?’ I suggest. And then the doors are slammed shut and we’re away. I wish Mia was with me. The look of terror on her face is something I will never forget.

Three hours later, I’m lying on a hard, plastic bed in a small curtained cubicle in Worthing hospital. Patrick is sitting on a grey plastic chair, his foot bouncing up and down. Impatience is coming off him in waves. When a doctor enters, a young man who looks as if he’s only a couple of years older than Mia, Patrick is off the chair like a rocket.

‘Why does