While we were waiting for the ambulance Peter said he needed to go to the loo, so I told Adrian to keep a grip on him as he went downstairs, in case he fell. I was then waiting upstairs in case the ambulance arrived (it was a valleys house with the front door on the middle floor). Jason was still ranting on. ‘Dezzer' was with him; a big bloke I’d never seen before.
‘The man’s a menace,’ Jason was saying. ‘He’s a paedophile and my girlfriend won't come around the house with him here.’
‘God,’ I said to Dezzer, who was standing at the open door to Jason’s room, ‘it’s like listening to a disembodied voice.’ I couldn’t see Jason; he was probably too pissed to get out of bed. Holes had been gouged in the wall of our passage, allegedly by Peter; the whole house was looking stinking again and worse than usual with holes in walls and a smashed-up door to add to the general filth.
There was even a saw on the carpet outside Jason’s door.
‘Whose is this saw?’ I asked.
‘It’s mine,’ Jason answered. I picked it up and shoved it into his room:
‘Keep it there!’ I ordered. ‘And what’s this chain?’ Without waiting for an answer, I shoved a big oily chain through his door.
‘The thing is, Becky, this is all playing havoc with my sex life.’
I looked at Dezzer. ‘Well, that's just too much information,’ I groaned and he nodded.
Adrian then walked past carrying a bag of rubbish from downstairs and at the same time we heard an almighty crash and more glass smashing.
Adrian went hurtling back downstairs; the next minute he was bringing Peter up. He had now ‘accidentally’ fallen backwards onto the jagged glass in the door and was bleeding profusely out of the back of his head. Adrian turned to hold onto his head, still using some Morrisons serviettes I’d found in my bag to deal with the gash on the front of his head. They were useless now that the blood was pouring out of the back of his head. The blood seemed to be coming from everywhere, and when he leant forward it came in a constant stream over his forehead and down to the tip of his nose and onto the floor. At the same time, it was pouring steadily down his back, turning his t-shirt red. I had to go outside to ring ‘999’ again (I couldn't hear the operator if I stayed inside because of Jason's intermittent shouting from his room). It had been twenty minutes since I'd first rang. I was put on hold for at least three minutes and then went through all the same questions again.
‘If he loses consciousness or has trouble with his breathing, lay him on his side. Hold the injury hard with a clean towel or cloths…’
‘I’ll be lucky to find anything clean here,’ I said and went back inside and downstairs to look for something. Adrian had been to the house in May and cleaned it from top to bottom, leaving new cloths and sponges below the sink, for the men to use. They were untouched. I gave the big yellow cloths to Adrian.
‘They’re no good!’ he snapped at me, ‘I need something bigger.'
‘Well, they have to be clean,’ I snapped back, ‘and this is all there is.’ Jason then started shouting something else from his bed.
‘For God’s sake, Jason, shut up!’ we shouted in unison and Peter started crying again and struggled to get to his feet from the bottom of the stairs where the blood was still pouring. Peter now gathered all his strength and lunged at Jason’s door, while the big, strapping Dezzer and Adrian pulled him back to stop him attacking Jason. Blood was dripping everywhere.
‘That’s the carpet ruined,’ I thought. Peter’s mental crisis was going to cost us a fortune. It wasn’t like we were a charity, funded by the tax-payer to help the needy.
But I was also starting to panic about him. We took him outside onto the pavement even though it was starting to rain and sat him on the doorstep. At least then he was not so close to Jason’s self-centred, antagonistic ranting. Peter kept moaning as Adrian pushed the cloths tightly to his head. It was harder to control his movements outside and he was really agitated. Stupid Jason was making it harder to stem the blood flow, which meant that Peter could die because of him. The whole of Peter’s t-shirt was now sodden with blood and I ‘phoned 999 for the third time.
‘We’ve got a lot of other life-threatening emergencies,’ the operator informed me when I explained it was now a real emergency.
‘Well, can you give me any idea when the ambulance will come? It’s getting very dangerous now. He’s lost a lot of blood and it's still pouring out of him.’
‘Well, you can’t be doing it right, then! You need to hold the cloth tight to the wound.’ Christ. We were now getting told off when the whole thing was nothing to bloody do with us.