CONSTANCE AND A PARAMEDIC

A wasp in a library, and chaos...

It was high summer and two biological forms entered the library in Brumpton at the same time as each other: a little old lady called Mavis who came every other day, more for company than because she was a big reader, and a wasp that couldn’t read at all but was searching for nectar and thought it could smell some.

The wasp buzzed around, annoyed Constance, the librarian, and went off to try to escape through a glass window.

Mavis, on the other hand, made for the Reference section. She didn’t need to refer to anything in particular but always managed to find something she could mutter my my, fancy that about and plan to remember it in case it ever came in useful. She rarely remembered a single fact, though, which didn’t matter as none of them would have come in useful.

Except for one, that is.

On this particular day she read about anaphylactic shocks at precisely the same moment when the wasp decided to demonstrate one by stinging her. It (the wasp) wasn’t in the library for reading or learning or doing anything of a literary nature, but it was there to find some nectar, and unfortunately the library had none, which so angered the insect that it took a savage swipe at Mavis’s arm and stung her.

Wasp stings are never pleasant and they do actually hurt very much indeed. This one hurt Mavis to the extent that she cried out with a mixture of a very naughty word and a howl all mixed together into a decibel soup and almost instantly began to feel very poorly indeed.

It was a good job that she’d been reading about anaphylactic shocks because she found herself in the midst of one.

The librarian was Constance and she was dealing with two intense schoolboys who were asking for a book about black holes and worm holes in space, and she was struggling to recall a single fact about either. The howl from Mavis alerted her to the existence of the computers and she sent the boys to them whilst advising bing or google before rushing to see what all the fuss was in the Reference section.

It really hadn’t taken long for her to get there, but by the time she did the poor old woman was lying on the floor twitching.

Constance knew when she was out of her depth and she shouted to Mr Carlysle who always took out books involving wars, pillage and mass murder and was standing by the counter and its telephone, waiting for her.

“Quick,” she called, “ring 999! And get an ambulance here. Mavis Treader has collapsed onto the floor, and she’s twitching!”

Mr Carlysle thought of querying the request and then thought better of it when it crossed his mind that there might be a dead body just round the corner from him, and despite his preferred reading material he’d never actually seen a dead body and didn’t want to start viewing them at this stage of his life. So he ran off, out of the library, in a blind funk, leaving the telephone deserted.

Fortunately the two school boys had a great deal more sense and one of them saw what had happened, heard the nice kind library lady being desperate and urgent, and took out his own mobile phone and within seconds was demanding an ambulance at the library straight away.

“I can’t tell you what’s wrong,” he shouted into the phone, “just that the library lady has shouted for an ambulance because an old lady’s just shrieked and fallen down!”

The other schoolboy, out of curiosity, went to see what all the trouble was really about and in a matter of seconds reported back to his friend on the phone “she’s not dead because she’s twitching, but she looks as poorly as my granny did last year when she died!”

So an ambulance was despatched in haste and arrived almost instantly, which may or may not have been a good thing for Mavis, who was swelling alarmingly and still twitching whilst lying on the nice polished wooden floor of the library.

Two paramedics ran in. They were both female and both, from the schoolboy’s perspective, very bossy when they asked where the patient was.

Then they were very efficient.

“Anaphylactic shock,” announced one of them and she, quick as lightning, found the point where the wasp, which by then was battering its head against the window in the hope that it might get out that way, had inflicted so much damage on her patient.

Paramedics, even those whom schoolboys find to be bossy, are really well trained and know what to do in an emergency, and in this emergency they managed to locate an adrenaline auto-injector in their equipment and deal as efficiently as was humanly possible with their patient.

Then, without any fuss or unnecessary bother, they managed to wheel their unexpected patient towards their ambulance, and were soon gone, blue lights flashing as if the world might end if they stopped.

That might have been that, but half an hour later one of them returned.

“Hello, you might not have noticed me in the emergency, but I’m Rosie and I helped the old lady who got stung,” she said, smiling at Constance, “I need a few details, if you have them.”

“Of course,” murmured Constance, “though I hardly know the woman. She comes in quite often and always sits in the Reference section.”

“Do you know her name?” asked Rosie.

“Yes, of course. It’s Mavis, I think. Mavis Treader. It always seems to me that it’s an odd name for an old lady to have.”

“And you wouldn’t know her address, I suppose?”

Constance shook her head. “I don’t think she ever had any library tickets, but I’ll check,” she said, turning to her computer screen and tapping a few characters on the keyboard. “You see,” she explained, “there are several elderly people like Mavis. They call in quite often, sometimes spend hours in here, but many of them never register or anything like that. No. There’s no Mavis Treader in the records, nor Treadwell or anything like that. I’m sorry.”

“That’s a shame,” murmured Rosie, shaking her head. “I hate it when this happens. You see, we need to contact her next of kin.”

“I should imagine she’s either single or a widow,” suggested Constance. “We get all sorts in here, and among the all sorts are some very lonely people who haven’t anything better to do than sit in the library and pass their lives away. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with anyone.”

“She didn’t have any kind of identification on her,” sighed Rosie, “not even an old utility bill or bus pass. Her handbag was, well, not exactly empty but there was nothing in it to suggest who owned it. Just a few coppers and, well, a thousand or so pounds in paper money!”

“Goodness me!” exclaimed Constance, “Goodness gracious me!”

“We’ll have to trawl round the nursing homes and places like that,” said Rosie, “and the office staff can do that. I just thought, as I was passing, it’s something I could do for the poor soul. And to think, she had all that money, some of it the old sort of notes, you know, no longer legal tender, as if she’s been saving all her life for something.”

“For her funeral I should think,” suggested Constance shaking her head, “if she was on her own it’s something that might have worried her. How she was going to spend eternity if there was nobody to take care of it for her. It makes me sad to think it.”

“Well, she’ll not know now,” said Rosie, looking down at her feet as she spoke, “she didn’t make it, the poor soul. Victory goes to the wasp, I suppose. But she must have been in her eighties. She’d had a good innings, as they say.”

“But nobody wants to go like that… not me, not anyone,” whispered Constance sadly.

“Nor me,” agreed Rosie.

© Peter Rogerson 16.01.18