However, real or not, Frankie was frightened of something and I knew from my own experiences of fear in the past just how awful that was. His eyes were full of tears, he was shaking, I felt for him. Whether or not I believed the stuff abut Pat McCauley and her friends at this point I do not know. I looked into Frankie’s face and smiled. “Who’s this friend of yours, then?”
“King Fahd of Saudi Arabia,” Frankie replied.
Of course, anything is possible. Ordinary people do meet up with kings and celebrities and strike up friendships with them from time to time. Frankie had been all over the world, and so it was just possible he had met up with a Saudi prince at some point in his travels. King Fahd, my oldest who wants to study politics at college told me, was about Frankie’s age. He had also, apparently, travelled a lot when he was young.
Because it was her ward, I had to tell Pat what I was doing. Frankie hadn’t seen King Fahd, so he said, since they were both youngsters and so we’d agreed just to send a letter to say that Mr. Driscoll wasn’t well. Pat said, “I don’t see the harm. It’s a load of eyewash of course, and you’ll never hear back, but if it keeps Frankie happy...”
She smiled across at him. I took my pen and writing paper over to Frankie’s bed and sat down beside him. “So Frankie,” I said, “what...”
“Vicious bitch!” Frankie said. I saw that his eyes were still firmly fixed on Pat. “Rotten cow!”
“Frank...”
“Don’t wanna write no letter today!” Frankie said. He looked down at me and I could see the heaviness of the drugs in his eyes. “Feel too rough. Big fat cow make me feel too rough.”
“Yes, well, maybe another...”
I was interrupted by Frankie’s noisy, unconscious breathing. I put my pad and pen back in my handbag.
The occupant of the bed next to Frankie’s, an elderly man called Stephen, said, “Ashes. From the crematorium. Everywhere.”
Tracey, who was as thin and wasted as her superior Pat was fat and blooming, came over and looked at Frankie with a smile on her face.
“He sleeping again?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “We were going to write a letter but...”
“Oh, bless!” Tracey said and then she walked back towards the ward office, went in, and pulled the door shut behind her.
We eventually got the letter written three days later. Frankie was, as had become usual for him that week, in his bed when he dictated it to me. But he was hopeful of an answer from his “old friend” whom he had addressed informally as “Fahd.” I asked him where I should send the letter and he looked at me struck and said, “Well, to The Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of course! And don’t forget to put my address in there for him to answer. He’ll come and get me, Fahd will, when he knows I’m in a place like this.”
At the ward meeting before hand-over again that night, I told everyone what I’d done and yet again Tracey said, “Bless.”
Because there was no way of knowing how much Frankie’s letter would cost to send to Saudi Arabia, I would have to take it to the post office. This I had already decided to do the following day when I wasn’t booked to work. Pat did offer to do this task for me, but I declined. I put the letter in the post to Saudi Arabia in the morning.
I didn’t work on the chronic or any other ward over at Runfold for three weeks after that. First of all I was sick, then it was Christmas, for which I wanted to be at home, and then the following week they didn’t need me. When I did go back, it was the New Year, 1995. Not that time appeared to have ticked over very much on the ward. Psychiatric wards are notoriously frozen in time; the chronic ward at Runfold being, seemingly, no exception. But then I had reckoned without Frankie.
Now, as he’d been before Christmas, bed-bound, he was nevertheless livelier than when I’d last seen him. “Did you send that letter off to my mate Fahd?” he said as soon as he saw me.
I said that I had.
Frankie smiled. “Good!” And then, first looking around the ward, he pointed towards the office and said, “I’ll show this lot! That big dollop reckons she’s going to get her fat hands on my little cottage — she’s got another thing coming!”
His “little cottage“? What “little cottage” was this?
“On the front at Padstow,” Frankie said in an impatient way as if I should somehow know this already. “Got it off Fahd, I did. Won him at a game of cards in Brindisi, I did. My old dad lived there years.”
“Yes, but Frankie,” I said, “if that’s so, why are you here in this hospital in Essex?”
I wasn’t telling him that what he was saying was wrong, but in line with the training I’d been given I wasn’t colluding with his delusion either. He was in a hospital in Essex, he had been originally admitted from an address in Southend on Sea, Padstow didn’t come into it, except as the place where he’d grown up. Not as far as I could see.
Frankie narrowed his eyes, leaned in towards me, and said, “I ain’t lying, girl. You get ahold of a wheelchair, take me outside, and I’ll tell you.”
“Why are you always in bed these days, Frankie?” I asked him as I stood up and looked around for a wheelchair.
“Tell you that outside, too,” he said darkly. “You got a fag, have you?”
“Just after the war, nineteen forty-eight, it were,” Frankie said as he puffed heavily on one of the cigarettes from my secret and very guilty stash at the bottom of my handbag. “Me and all these Arabs played cards at this club in Brindisi. I didn’t know that the bloke I just knew as Fahd was a prince until it was all over. Then, when he give me a great heap of money I won off him, he told me. See him again a few years later in Gibraltar, went out we did, just him and me. I told him I bought me dad a little place in Padstow with his money. Fahd, he laughed and he said that were a good thing to do and if I ever needed his help I was just to say so. He never thought he’d be king, you know. He’s just like you and me, girl.”
There was no way of knowing whether any of this was true or not. King Fahd had, apparently, in his youth, travelled widely and could well have spent some time in the sort of places merchant seamen might frequent. After all, even princes can be curious about the seamier side of the world’s great ports. But the place in Padstow was something quite different. There was no mention of it anywhere in his notes. When Frankie was “committed,” which is what happened to people back in the ‘sixties when they became mentally unwell, he’d been staying at a bed-and-breakfast place in Southend. For all practical purposes, he was homeless. Unmarried, the name he gave as his next of kin was indeed his father, even though he had apparently died back in the late 1950s. Nowhere was there any mention of a house, money, or anything of any value whatsoever.
“So why have you been in that bed since well before Christmas, Frankie?” I asked as I took a cigarette out for myself and then, very shamefacedly, lit up.
He first looked towards the windows of the ward behind the bushes and then, turning back to me, he said, “Big fat dollop and her mates keep on giving me them injections. Tell me it’s the diabetes, but it ain’t. Takes my legs away, them injections do. I think what they give me is getting stronger, girl. If Fahd don’t get back to us soon, you’ll have to tell your agency.”
I thought about telling him that “my agency” wasn’t in any way what I imagined he thought it was, but then I didn’t. It would only agitate and confuse him. Later, when I took Frankie back to the ward, Janice asked me what I’d been doing and why. I told her that Frankie had asked to be taken out to get some fresh air.
“Well, that’s good of you to do that, Julia,” Janice said. “But you should really tell Pat first if you’re going to take a patient off the ward. I mean, Frankie does have physical problems, too, doesn’t he?”