As I walked out, though, I called over my shoulder: “But don’t worry. I won’t tell old Black Feathers. I don’t really care who made a fool of his great-nephew, or why. It probably served him right.”
© 2008 by Simon Levack
Poor Old Frankie
by Barbara Nadel
Barbara Nadel is a celebrated author in her native Britain, having won the CWa’s Silver Dagger in 2005 for Deadly Web, an entry in her contemporary police procedural series set in Turkey, starring Inspector Cetin Ikmen. Her latest Ikmen novel, A Passion for Killing, came out in the U.K. in 2007. “Poor Old Frankie” was inspired by Ms. Nadel’s own experience: she once worked in a psychiatric hospital.
Father forgive me for I have sinned...
For a time, Frankie made shifts at the Run-fold Psychiatric Hospital worth-while, and I let him down. When you work for a nursing agency you don’t usually get close to the patients. But Frankie Driscoll was different. He was still in there. What do I mean by that exactly? I mean that he hadn’t turned into a shuddering vegetable like so many of them do on the long-term chronic wards. Frankie Driscoll was a far greater person than just his diagnosis or even the medication that coshes most of his kind to the ground.
I met Frankie one morning in December 1994. Loping past the dead tangle of bushes that were allowed to straggle unkempt outside the chronic ward, the first words he ever said to me were, “Can I trust you, girl?”
Suspicious as ever with unknown patients about what might be about to follow, I nevertheless replied, “Yes.”
“Come here.” He beckoned me over with one thin, sharp-nailed finger. He was old, at least seventy I reckoned at the time, and his hair was as white as the sheets on the patients’ beds should have been.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What’s yours?” he countered.
I watched him shift what remained of his roll-up from the left to the right-hand side of his toothless mouth. “You a nurse, a new nurse,” he said. “I seen you.”
“I’m with the agency,” I said.
“I know that!” he responded as if to an idiot, “Why you think I want to talk to you?”
It isn’t easy to do a good job as a temporary or agency nurse who works with people who are physically ill. You don’t know the patients or the other staff and getting information out of stressed or overworked people isn’t easy. In a psychiatric setting this is even, if anything, harder. Psychiatric patients need to be listened to, understood, and not just dismissed as “delusional.” Not all of the tales that they tell exist only in their heads. Before I started working for the agency, I was on the permanent staff of the Wicklow Psychiatric Hospital twenty miles back towards London. I got to know patients on what had been my own chronic ward well. Only sometimes did my patients’ stories live only in their minds.
“I’m Frankie,” the old man in front of me said.
“Julia,” I said.
He nodded. “Well, Julia,” he said, “it’s about what happens in the evenings. Them horrors on that ward, they trying to poison poor old Frankie.”
Hand-over to the night staff was at five-thirty in the afternoon. It was now five, but because it was winter it was already dark. The six of us who had covered the day shift had to sit crammed into the tiny ward office which was lit, for some reason, by a light bulb that was struggling to push out forty watts of power. Pat, the ward manager, liked to have a chat with “her” staff before the ward was given over to the night nurses.
“Any other bits of business?” she said after the various medication and therapy regimes that patients were on had been discussed. “Problems?”
Pat McCauley wasn’t the easiest woman to work for. Like me, she was in her mid forties with the full Monty of husband, kids, and mortgage back home. Unlike me, she was both enormously overweight and very, very sociable. Pat didn’t “do” criticism and neither did her two deputies, Tracey and Janice. The three of them were a team. On my first day at Runfold, which had only been the previous week, I had witnessed — sort of — what had happened when the only other permanent member of staff, Geoff, had questioned something Pat had done. The three of them had taken him into the office, Pat had pulled the blinds down, and half an hour later Geoff had emerged quiet and seemingly thoughtful. It was at that point that I made a promise to myself not to tangle with Pat or any of her acolytes. After what had happened at the Wicklow I knew I didn’t need it. Against all my natural instincts I swallowed back what Frankie had told me and said nothing. At the end of the meeting Pat and the other two waved the rest of us on our way home with cheery smiles.
“See you tomorrow,” Pat said thickly as we left, “unless any of us wins the lottery!”
Sarah, the other agency nurse, muttered words to the effect that after a lottery win we couldn’t expect to see her for dust. Pat shut the door behind us and I heard her, Tracey, and Janice sit back down again.
I was walking from the ward to the car park when Frankie loomed up at me again. “You never said nothing about me to that great fat dollop and her pals, did you?” he said as he nervously rolled his cigarette around the edges of his mouth.
“No.” I sighed. The story Frankie had told me that morning, embellished with various paranoid details like the one about the KGB parachuting into the hospital grounds, had basically revolved around a belief he had that he was being injected with something — he didn’t know what — against his will. This was happening just before hand-over every afternoon and Frankie named Pat McCauley as his assailant. Her acolytes apparently helped by holding Frankie down. Much as the three of them gave me the creeps, I couldn’t believe that they would do such a thing.
“But why would Pat and the others want to do that?” I said. “You’re no trouble, Frankie.”
I’d read his file. Frankie was diabetic, but not badly so and was given his intravenous insulin, along with his psychiatric medication, every morning.
Frankie leaned in towards me, his rank cigarette-scented breath blasting into my face. “She want my money, that fat lazy dollop!” he said.
“Yes, but...”
“They keep giving me medicine, see,” he said. “That make me not know what I’m doing. I could sign anything they want me to like that.”
“Yes, but...”
“Then they’ll kill me!” he gabbled. “I need help, girl! Don’t know what I have done and what I ’ent! You’re new here, you look as like you can be trusted. I hope to Christ that you can! Get a letter to my friend, will you, girly?”
Frankie, Francis Driscoll, had been, so his file had told me, a merchant seaman in his youth. He’d been very far from his native Cornwall, all over the world, in fact, before he’d started hearing voices in his early forties. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1969, he’d been at Runfold ever since. There was no mention in his file of any money or property. The only hint of anything vaguely connected to wealth was the name of his hometown, Padstow, the village now, over ten years later, made fashionable by the celebrity chef Rick Stein.
“Frankie, I don’t know about all this,” I said as I looked down at the car keys now in my hands.
“Think I’m just a raving nutter, do you?” Frankie said, his lank white hair shaking with anger. “Just like the rest of them! Thought you was different, I did! Thought I saw summat there in your eyes, some human feeling, so I did! You’s with the agency!”
Quite what Frankie thought my being an agency nurse meant, I didn’t know. But I suspected he imagined I was maybe, in reality, with a friendly security force of some sort. A lot of patient delusions revolve around war, politics, and espionage.