Holding Out For a Hero

by Caroline Anderson

‘Some of the things I’ve done have been a bit crazy. A bit dangerous.’

  ‘Mmm. This is a bit tame for you, really, isn’t it, shadowing me?’

  ‘Tame? I wouldn’t call it tame. Just…different.’

  ‘So,’ she said, feeling her heart pump a little and trying hard to keep her voice casual, ‘what branch of medicine were you in?’

  For a moment she thought he wouldn’t reply, but then he did, to her surprise. ‘Anaesthetics. I was specialising in paeds.’

  ‘Whereabouts? Town, city, country?’

  ‘The Royal London.’

  ‘Wow. That’s a bit cutting edge—lots of trauma. Anything to do with why you gave up?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Too far. ‘OK,’ she demurred. Well, almost. ‘Just one more thing.’

  ‘What?’ His voice was flat and uninviting now, but she persevered.

  ‘Were you struck off?’

  He stopped dead in his tracks and turned to stare at her in amazement. ‘Str—No, I most certainly was not struck off!’

  She lifted her hands in surrender. ‘Just asking.’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ he growled. ‘It’s none of your damn business.’

  It wasn’t, of course, but…

  She let her breath out on a gusty sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t really being nosy. I just thought it might help me understand you a little better. I’m not Pete, you know. I don’t have an axe to grind, and I don’t want to do this programme any more than you do. I just thought you might like to know you had a friend.’

  He grunted. He didn’t sound convinced, but he turned and started walking again as if nothing had happened. If she hadn’t seen the shutter come down over his eyes she might have believed him.

  So. Paediatric anaesthetics at the Royal London. Burn-out? It happened at major trauma centres, and with HEMS, the helicopter emergency medical service, being based there, it was certainly one of the major trauma centres for the London area, especially for RTAs, since they covered the M25 and all areas within it, and the M25 was the busiest motorway in England and suffered in consequence with more than its share of accidents.

  Was that it? Just too much? Too many senseless RTA victims? Maybe a child who hadn’t been restrained—maybe several, over and over again, because it happened, he was right, and there wasn’t really any excuse that training couldn’t overcome unless the child had learning difficulties of some sort.

  Oh, it was a minefield, the clues too deeply hidden for her to spot them all, but at least she was a little nearer to understanding him. She hoped.

  They walked in silence now, but a different kind of silence, and the gap between them could have been a mile wide. Certainly their hands were no longer linked, and she missed the warmth of that contact more than she’d believed possible.

  Crazy. She was getting in too deep, getting too involved with a man who wanted nothing to do with her.

  Except he had so nearly kissed her.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He’d stopped, his head raised, listening, but over the breeze off the sea and the lapping of the waves she could hear only the gulls wheeling overhead, their keening cries strangely bleak now.

  And then she heard it—a cry for help, someone screaming, sobbing, and without hesitation she broke into a run. Ben streaked away from her, his longs legs eating up the sand, and moments later she saw them.

  They were by one of the breakwaters, two girls crouched down low. One seemed to be holding the other one up somehow and sobbing frantically.

  ‘She’s stuck on a spike!’ she screamed. ‘She slipped and fell—help me!’

  And then Ben was there on one knee, taking the weight of the injured girl in his arms, propping her on his other leg, taking over. As Meg arrived, his eyes met hers and the message in them wasn’t one she wanted to read.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ve got you,’ he was saying reassuringly, but Meg wasn’t sure if he was talking to the girl who was impaled or the other one, hovering beside him, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘We need an ambulance,’ she sobbed. ‘A doctor.’

  ‘I’m a doctor, and she’s a nurse,’ Ben said in a voice designed to give them confidence, and Meg’s breath caught. Thank God. She’d been so afraid she’d have to do this alone, but to her relief he was no longer denying his medical background.

  He turned to Meg. ‘She’s caught on something,’ he said softly. ‘Could you look?’

  She ducked down round him and peered up, but it was hard to see. The light jacket the injured girl was wearing was drooping down and obstructing her view, and as Meg pushed it out of the way blood ran through a tear in the cloth and splashed all over her.

  ‘We’ve got a bit of a bleed here, Ben,’ she said calmly, hoping he would pick up on her meaning without terrifying the other girl. ‘And a definite impalement—something’s sticking into her side, but I have no idea how long it is.’

  ‘OK,’ he said calmly. ‘Can you see what it is?’

  ‘Not really.’

  The other girl was whimpering, her voice high and out of control now, almost unintelligible with fear. ‘Help her. Please, help her—she’s my sister.’

  ‘It’s OK, my love,’ Meg said, squeezing her hand. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Kate—I’m…Kate, and she’s…Jess.’

  ‘OK, Kate, have you got a mobile?’ Ben asked urgently, and the girl who’d spoken nodded.

  ‘Yes. I’ll ring—who?’

  ‘Nine-nine-nine. You’ll need ambulance, paramedic, fire brigade to free her—’

  ‘Ben, she’ll need airlifting,’ Meg advised, watching the blood drip into the water. Water. Dear God.

  They were kneeling in water, and the tide was coming in, racing across the almost flat sand of the beach, advancing at a terrifying rate. They had five, maybe ten minutes before the water would start to slosh against Jess’s wound, and another ten before she was underwater.

  ‘Ben, we’re running out of time,’ she said under her breath, and he nodded.

  ‘There’s no sign of anything coming through this side. Can you see what’s holding her? It might not be very long.’

  She looked again. ‘Metal. A narrow metal plate on the side of the post.’ Rusty and filthy and encrusted with weed, and no clue how long it was, how far it had penetrated. Dear God. And the tide was rising inch by inch.

  ‘Make a pack out of something—your T-shirt’ll do. And press it firmly all round the wound, holding it tight.’

  But she’d already done it by the time he’d finished talking. Anchoring it with one hand, she held the other hand out to Kate.

  ‘Give me the phone, I’ll talk to them. You hold this, and don’t let go.’

  She moved away from Ben and the girls, speaking to the operator at the ambulance headquarters. ‘We need the air ambulance, as fast as you can. We’ve got an impaled casualty on the water-line and the tide’s coming in fast. We’ll need the fire brigade with cutting gear, too.’ Giving swift, accurate directions, she checked they’d understood and then called Tom to warn him.

  ‘OK. You say she’s impaled, so there’s no way you can lift her off, not if she’s bleeding. Check her pulse.’

  She stuck the phone under her ear and reached for Jess’s neck. ‘Weak, rapid, thready,’ she reported, as much to Ben as to Tom. ‘Resps are harsh and guarded. She’s a bit cyanotic.’

  ‘Damn. What’s Ben doing?’

  ‘Holding her up. He’s got his hands full.’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  She glanced at him, and saw the concentration in his face. He was talking to Jess, soothing her, although Meg wasn’t sure she could hear.

  ‘For now,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Right. Get him to hold her as still as possible, and try and get a pressure pad on the wound.’

  ‘Done that. Tom—the tide. We haven’t got long.’

  ‘Save the phone battery. I’ll hassle them. You look out for the chopper,’ he said, and rang off.
r />   She handed the phone back to Kate.

  ‘Well? Are they coming?’

  ‘They’re coming.’

  ‘But the water—’

  ‘It’s OK, Kate. It’ll be OK, they’ll be here in a couple of minutes,’ she said, injecting as much reassurance as she could into her voice. ‘Ten minutes, tops. Ben, Tom says leave her there but hold her as steady as you can.’

  He nodded. ‘I am. Keep pressing that pad. If we can slow the bleeding…’

  He broke off, shifting his grip slightly, and the water swirled in around him and splashed against the wooden barrier, drenching them and flowing away bright red.

  Their eyes locked. Time was running out.

  ‘She’s going to die,’ Kate sobbed. ‘Jess, please, please, don’t die!’

  The cold water had roused Jess, and her eyes flickered open. ‘Kate,’ she said weakly. ‘Hurts. Want Mum.’

  ‘Hold her hand,’ Meg said, and Kate knelt down on the other side, on the higher sand, and clutched her sister’s hand for dear life. It suddenly dawned on Meg that they were probably too young to be staying in the area alone, and in that case…

  ‘Are your parents near here?’ she asked, and Kate nodded.

  ‘In that cottage over there.’ She jerked her head towards the road, and in the distance Meg could see a little white weatherboard beach house. ‘We’re on holiday.’

  ‘Call them. They need to know.’

  While she fumbled with the phone and spoke frantically to her parents, Meg watched the water rise faster than she would have believed possible.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Kate said, and looked at the water, her eyes widening as she realised just how quickly the tide was coming in. ‘Can’t you lift her off? She’ll drown…Oh, God, help her, please!’

  ‘Bleeding’s eased,’ Meg told Ben, but they both knew it was probably because the exit was obstructed and the wound was probably still bleeding inside her chest.

  ‘Could be an intercostal vessel,’ Ben said, obviously reading her mind. And that, of course, was the best possible scenario. Meg could only hope Jess was that lucky, because if not they were going to lose her.

  Another wave came, higher this time, and Meg did her best to block it so it broke against her and not the wood, but it swirled round, of course, and this time it didn’t recede nearly so far. Jess’s legs were lying in it, her hair trailed in it, and the next wave was right up against her back, soaking the T-shirt Meg was using as a pressure pad and rendering it useless.

  Then Ben went still.

  ‘Chopper,’ he said shortly, and met Meg’s eyes again as the water swirled even higher and flooded over Jess’s chest. ‘I’m going to lift her off. We don’t have time to wait for the fire brigade to cut her free. If we don’t get her off we’ll risk sea water pouring into the chest wound, and we’ve got back-up now. Kate, go and wave and attract their attention,’ he ordered, and Kate leapt to her feet and ran up the beach, screaming and waving her arms frantically as the yellow dot of the East Anglian Air Ambulance zeroed in on them.

  ‘Right. That’s her out of the way. This may not be nice,’ Ben said tightly. ‘I want you to get down there and see what’s happening as I lift her, and be ready to press something over it the moment she’s free. At the very least she’ll have a sucking chest wound. I don’t want to think about other scenarios.’

  Neither did Meg. She waited for the water to recede, then took away the pressure pad and nodded. ‘OK. Lift away.’

  Her heart was pounding, but the lift was clean, and the metal blade had only penetrated a couple of inches. She pressed the T-shirt back over the hole and ran with Ben up the beach, setting Jess down on her side with the wound upwards, away from the sand, just as her parents arrived, her father in pyjamas, her mother in shorts and a nightshirt, both of them frantic.

  ‘Jess!’ the mother screamed, but the father held her back, giving them room.

  Then the air ambulance team were there, two paramedics and all the equipment, covering the gaping chest wound with a plastic sheet taped on three sides to allow air trapped in the chest to escape, giving her oxygen, getting in an IV line.

  By this time the police had also arrived, a WPC taking Jess’s shaking mother in her arms and hugging her reassuringly while her father hugged Kate, falling apart completely now her parents were there and it was all right to give in.

  Then Jess was loaded and away, her mother at her side, and the police were taking the rest of the family to the hospital by car. ‘They’ll be there in about five minutes,’ Meg told Ben, watching them leave. Then she turned to him and saw the bleak expression on his face.

  ‘I shouldn’t have lifted her, but I had no choice. She would have drowned before we could have cut that metal bar. I hope to God she makes it.’

  ‘She stands far more chance because of what we did than if we hadn’t been here,’ she pointed out, but his mouth was grim and he didn’t look convinced.

  He was shaking, shaking like she was, all over, from adrenaline and cold. The sun wasn’t hot yet, and they were soaked and chilled through from the sea water.

  And she was standing there in her bra and shorts, covered in blood, when the fire brigade arrived.

  Great. All those hunky firemen catching her in her bloody underwear—literally—with her nipples standing out like chapel hat pegs and her skin as bumpy as the Christmas goose.

  Someone put a blanket round her shoulders, and she and Ben were led along the beach to the car park. They’d lost their shoes, washed away by the incoming tide, but she didn’t care.

  ‘We’ll be fine now,’ Ben said. ‘We’ve got fresh clothes in the car. To be honest, all we really need is a hot shower.’

  So the firemen left them to it, and Ben threw her a thick, warm sweater out of the back of his car.

  ‘Here, put this on,’ he instructed, but she didn’t need telling twice. She was cold and nearly naked, and she snuggled gratefully into it.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, her teeth chattering, but he just grunted.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll put the heater on. Get in.’

  ‘I’m covered in blood and sand and sea water. What about your car?’

  ‘What about my car? The leather will wipe clean, and even if it won’t, I don’t see us walking home.’

  No. Silly. So she got in, and within moments the heat started to filter through the vents and she began to relax.

  ‘So much for my day off,’ she said drily.

  ‘So much for our breakfast.’

  ‘I’ll cook you brunch,’ she said, and his mouth tightened. ‘I can cook, you know, I won’t poison you.’

  ‘I’m sure. I’m just not hungry.’

  She looked more keenly at him, taking in the lines of strain around his eyes, the grim set of his mouth, and wondered how much of an ordeal that morning had been to him.

  She still had no idea what had happened in his past, but this morning he’d done what had been necessary and coped with the crisis without a second’s hesitation. Yet now it was over he was retreating again, disappearing off into that private world that had KEEP OUT! written on it in letters ten feet high.

  And she was definitely on the outside.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OF COURSE the phone wasn’t quiet for many moments. That would have been too much to expect, and if he’d had a grain of sense he would have turned it off.

  With a growl of frustration Ben punched a button on the handset, and, because it was hands-free, Meg also got the benefit of Pete’s wrath firsthand.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Maguire? And where’s the nurse? We’re supposed to be with her and you’ve buggered off somewhere, and we went to the hospital to see if anyone had any idea where you were, since you’ve seen fit to check out of the hotel without discussing it with me, and all hell was breaking loose, a girl brought in by air ambulance and they said you and Meg been involved in some dramatic rescue.’

  ‘News travels fast,’ Ben said drily, and Pete exploded.<
br />
  ‘What? It’s true? So where are you? And why, for God’s sake, don’t you answer your phone?’

  ‘Because we’ve been for a run on the beach. That’s what we were doing when we found her injured.’

  ‘Well, get yourselves back here, fast. If you’d been here we could have followed it, but instead—’

  ‘If we’d been there,’ he said tightly, ‘you wouldn’t have a story to cover because she would have been brought in dead and we would have known nothing about it. And anyway, why the hell should we want to come to the hospital? It’s Meg’s day off.’

  ‘The parents want to see you—to thank you. So get your butts over here now and start earning that exorbitant salary.’

  ‘I wish,’ Ben muttered. Stabbing the phone with his index finger, he cut the producer off in midstream.

  Meg stared at him in astonishment. ‘Is he always like that?’

  ‘Only if he feels a photo opportunity slipping through his fingers.’ He sighed roughly. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Don’t worry. So, are we?’

  ‘Are we what?’

  ‘Going to the hospital?’

  He met her eyes briefly, then looked back at the road. ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. Not for Pete, and certainly not to be thanked, but just to see if Jess is all right and give Kate a hug. Poor girl was distraught. She could only have been—what, fourteen? Fifteen?’

  He shrugged. ‘Search me. They looked about the same age. Twins?’

  ‘Could be. So, are we going?’

  He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. ‘Not without a shower. I stink of seaweed and I’ve got dried blood under my nails, and Pete will have Steve hovering there with the camera. But, yes, if you want, we can go. I should be filming with you today anyway, and it will make good TV, so let’s do it and keep Pete happy.’

  ‘The line of least resistance?’ Meg said with a smile, and he gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘Something like that. Want me to drop you off and wait for you while you shower, or pick you up later?’

  ‘I’ve got clothes with me to change into—why don’t we go straight to Tom and Fliss’s and shower there, to save time?’