Jill Steeples - Desperately Seeking Heaven

Oh no, no, no!

I don’t do blood or infirmity or disaster. Frantically I looked around, desperate for someone to join me, preferably a paramedic type, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was up to me to go over, but my feet felt welded to the ground. Surely no one could have crawled out of that car alive. Reaching inside my jacket for my mobile, I started to walk, before quickly breaking into a run, looking ahead and trying at the same time to find my phone. Damn! Where was the bloody thing?

Within moments I was beside the wreckage and almost wept with relief to find that the bundle on the ground was in fact a man, alive and if not exactly kicking, looking remarkably unscathed, as he sat there, his arms hugging his knees.

‘Thank god,’ I gasped, ‘are you all right?’ I bent down to meet his eyes, my hand reaching out to touch his shoulder as if to check he was in one piece.

‘Hi.’ He smiled lightly, his piercing grey eyes latching onto mine, holding me entranced. He ran a hand through mussed-up black hair, before extending his arm in friendly greeting as if we’d just been introduced at some social occasion.

‘My phone!’ I needed my bloody phone. ‘I think I’ve left it in my car.’ Don’t panic, I screeched inwardly, my arms waving frantically towards the main road. ‘I’ll just run and fetch it, ring for an ambulance.’

‘No! Don’t.’ He spoke with an authority that stopped me in mid-flight.

‘But you need to be checked over. You look, um…’ Awful. He looked worse than awful, but in such a beguiling way that I couldn’t drag my eyes away from him. His warm brown voice was gently hypnotic too. Weirdly, it was like reconnecting with a long-lost friend. ‘A bit peaky to me,’ I managed, my hands reaching out to touch his face. ‘You’re probably in shock.’

He emitted a hollow laugh.

‘Shock? Yeah, I am a bit.’ He shook his head, bemused. ‘But really I’m okay.’ His expression softened. ‘Besides, the emergency services, they’ve been.’

‘What? And just left you here? No. They wouldn’t do that.’

‘No.’ He eased himself up to a standing position, his long body uncurling. He must have been six foot two at least, the muscles in his upper arms and shoulders clearly defined beneath his creased blue shirt. ‘The accident, it happened earlier. The police and ambulance came and sorted everything. It’s fine. All fine.’ He brushed himself down distractedly. ‘They gave me the all clear. There’s nothing to worry about. I just came back to have a look. To see what happened.’ He let out a long slow whistle. ‘Can’t believe the state of the car.’

‘Me neither.’ I turned to look at the mangled mess. The accident had happened earlier? I felt certain I’d missed it by only a matter of minutes. I must have imagined those wheels spinning. Still, this guy looked pretty shook up. And what was he thinking coming back to examine the wreckage? He couldn’t just hang around here in the middle of a field, reliving the awful incident over in his mind. A light wind was whipping across the hedges, taunting my goose bumps. It wouldn’t do him any good stuck in the freezing cold after the trauma he’d just been through. One thing was for certain though, his car wasn’t going anywhere but the salvage yard.

‘Is someone coming to pick you up?’

He tilted his head, looking at me puzzled.

‘They’ll have to take the car away. Examine it, I guess.’ His hand caressed the misshapen metal of the bonnet.

‘No, I meant you, is someone coming to collect you? To take you home?’

‘I don’t know.’ He gave a funny little laugh. ‘I don’t think so.’

Really it was shocking the way the state of the country was going. This guy was clearly in a bad way. OK so he had no broken bones, but anyone with an inch of compassion could tell that he was in deep shock. His dark eyes were hollow, his skin tinged with grey and the hairs on his arms were standing on end. What were the emergency services thinking, leaving the poor man in this condition? He should be in hospital being checked over or at least at home tucked up in bed.

‘Look, come with me,’ I said, offering my arm, ‘let’s go to my car and then we’ll decide what to do.’

‘Will you take me home?’ he asked, his voice lifting.

‘Of course, I will.’ I patted his arm gently, the touch of his skin under my fingers sending an icy chill down my bones. ‘Gosh, you’re freezing. Come on, I’ve got a blanket in the car. Do you think I should ring someone? Tell them what’s happened, that you’re OK?’

‘No, there’s no one,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I, um,’ he faltered, shaking his head again as if trying to make sense of it all, putting on a brave face for my benefit. My heart tugged at his vulnerability. ‘Could we go to yours, maybe?’ he added.

His imploring gaze touched me deep inside. I didn’t know why, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t face going home yet. For the moment it seemed he wanted only the comfort of a stranger.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ We walked together away from the crash scene, me hanging onto his arm unsure whether I was supporting him or whether he was holding me up. ‘I only live down the road. I think we could both do with a nice cup of tea. Then we can think about having you looked over, seeing a doctor or something.’

‘Tea sounds good,’ he said, in barely more than a whisper.

It wasn’t until I’d put him in the passenger seat and tucked a blanket around his frozen limbs, pulling closed the lid of the car, that the second really freaky thing of the day occurred to me. Manoeuvring the car out of the lay-by, I glanced across at the man whose name I didn’t know yet with a stirring of recognition. And then I looked at him again, examining the defined jawline, the set of his mouth which made him look as though he was permanently smiling, and the deep-set grey eyes which when they focused on you made you feel that you were at the centre of his universe.

It was the eyes that were the clincher. Intense and magnetic, they’d held my gaze on many an occasion. With a jolt of recognition, I gasped. James McArthur, Mr Daytime television himself, affectionately known as Jimmy Mack to his adoring public, was sitting in my car. The realisation turned me into a gibbering quivering wreck. Oh my gawd!

His black hair, usually worn short and neat on screen, had grown longer and swept over one eye, offering him a mysterious air. Wayward tendrils skimmed the edge of his collar and I had to supress an urge to lean over and tidy them up with my fingers.

He was even more gorgeous in the flesh than on the screen, if that was possible, and my breath caught at the back of my throat as my pulse went into overdrive. Being a master in stating the bleeding obvious, I said, ever-so-not-so-casually, ‘You’re Jimmy Mack, aren’t you? Off the telly?’ Talk about losing all coolness and credibility in the space of a few seconds.

He turned his gaze on me, smiled a megawatt smile that sent my insides to mush, and nodded.

‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked, as if it had only just occurred to him that I might have one.

‘Alice. Alice Fletcher.’ Now it was me shaking my head. I couldn’t help imagining what everyone would say when I told them I’d acted as a guardian angel to probably the most recognisable man in the public eye and we were planning on sharing a cup of tea together. How amazing was that? Maybe I’d even get to appear on his show. “ Meet Alice Fletcher, the heroine who rescued our very own Jimmy Mack from his car wreckage .” That was exactly the sort of sensationalism his show went in for.

Back at my flat in a flurry of heightened excitement, I clucked around him like a mother hen. I made him a cup of tea, put him on the sofa, threw a duvet over him and generally watched over him. I was desperate to contact someone, anyone to let them know what had happened, but he wasn’t having any of it. Maybe he was on his way to somewhere he shouldn’t have been, I mused, wondering about the private side to this very public man.