“You’re fine,” he said, promising. “You’re going to be fine, you’re going to be safe. Hang on.”

The man had stopped thrashing but now seemed to be suffocating. He couldn’t catch his breath and turned a horrible shade of blue as his head went back, banging onto the ground. Someone in the room screamed; the music had been turned off and the beautiful young bar staff was standing around looking panicked.

Cormac immediately started doing mouth to mouth on the man, feeling for a pulse worriedly. He lifted his head briefly. “Have you got a defibrillator?”

Someone nodded and a yellow box was opened.

“Give it here . . . Is there a doctor around?”

Of course not, thought Cormac, as he continued to perform CPR. Real people with real jobs didn’t really belong here. He noticed in his eyeline the man who played a doctor on television approaching.

“You must be joking,” he snarled.

“Well, you see, I have done it a lot and performed it, and I feel quite qualified.”

“You’re fine,” said Cormac shortly, relenting. “Okay, hold down his arms.”

There was no heartbeat at all now. Cormac knelt over the man’s chest and took the defibrillator.

“Right, when I say clear, let him go. One, two, three . . . clear!”

The actor sat back as the body beneath him jolted. Cormac leaned over, listening for a heartbeat.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, wee man. You can do it. Come on.”

He shocked him again, fingers crossed. Honestly, once you got into this, he knew—as anyone else who worked in actual medicine, rather than TV medicine, knew—that it was over. He had a horrible, horrible feeling that as well as looking like a cheap, tongue-tied country bumpkin idiot, he was also going to look like a killer or a lazy and useless nurse, according to people who’d only ever watched resuscitations from the comfort of their own trendy leather sofas, in which everyone miraculously returns to life.

“Clear! Come on,” he almost screamed in frustration, jumping back down to perform mouth to mouth. “Come on!!”

Suddenly the man’s body jolted. Cormac took nothing from this; aftershocks were incredibly common in the dead. He bent, though, and lowered his head to the man’s chest. The relief he felt when he heard, slowly, first one thump then another, was one of the most gushing feelings of his entire life.

“Yes,” he hissed. “Come on, Billy Boy. Come on.”

An ambulance crew ran into the room through the now-silent crowd, which had parted to let them in.

“Asystolic?” said the ambulance paramedic, a large, sweet-faced Indian boy.

“Ventricular fibrillation,” said Cormac.