Say It Out Loud

On the second Tuesday of every month, the village hall in Otley smells of instant coffee and floor polish, and a plastic dummy lies on a blue mat in the middle of the floor.

Ludmila was the best in the class. She had the rhythm exactly right, thirty compressions and two breaths, and the instructor used her as the example twice.

Colin was the worst. He knelt on his own hand. He forgot the breaths. When he tried to say the steps back at the end of the evening, they came out in the wrong order.

The instructor stopped him there. “Say them out loud. All of it is orders — press hard, don't move him, call an ambulance. Say the order, and your hands do it for you.”

Colin said his orders out loud for the rest of the class, which everybody found very funny.

At nine, in the car park, a teenage boy came off his bike at the corner by the recycling bins. The front wheel caught the curb and he went down hard on his arm, and there was a lot of blood, which is normal for an arm and did not look normal at all.

Ludmila got to him first. She knew everything. She knew not to move him, she knew what to press and how hard, she knew the number. She had practiced all of it forty times that year on the mat. She knelt down with her hands ready, and then she stayed exactly like that, and nothing happened.

Colin arrived five seconds later, out of breath, already talking. “Don't move him,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Don't move him. Somebody call an ambulance. Press here — press hard, and don't lift your hand to look.”

Ludmila called the ambulance, because he had told her to.

It was a broken wrist and six stitches, and the boy was more upset about the bike than about the wrist. Afterwards, in the emptying car park, Ludmila asked Colin how he had done it, when he couldn't remember a single step in class.

“I still can't remember it,” he said. “I just say it. Then I've always got something to do next.”

She has been on two courses since then, and she says every step out loud now, even to the dummy.