“Yes. Oh. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Janice said brightly.
But over at the other side of the ward, Pat looked on with a very straight face. Halfway through the afternoon she came over to me, when I was scrubbing off some dropped food from a patient’s cardigan at the sink.
“Nice the way that old Frankie has taken to you, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes,” I replied as I scrubbed away at what really was a very sad old lady’s cardigan.
“I like the way you handled that thing with the king of Saudi Arabia,” Pat said. “That was good.”
“Thank you.” I felt there was a “but” heading my way somewhere along the line and so I looked down at the poor old cardigan probably with more obvious concentration than I would do normally.
“ ’Course, I know that you wasn’t in any way colluding with his delusion,” Pat said. “But do be careful, won’t you, Julia?”
I looked up, feeling the blood flush hot into my face as I did so.
“I know what happened over at the Wicklow wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You weren’t well at the time.” She smiled. “I mean, just because we work in this business, don’t mean we can’t have our own little breakdowns from time to time, does it? But...”
“But what?” I said as all the hair on the back of my neck stood up at once.
“But just be careful,” Pat said. “About what you do for the patients. They are unwell and... well, Julia, we don’t want an ‘incident’ here at Runfold, do we?”
She then continued to smile into my face for another few seconds before she moved off back towards her office once again. Shaken, I sat down in a chair next to the sink and began to sweat. I hadn’t been dismissed, exactly, from the Wicklow hospital when I’d had my breakdown, but they had “let me go,” with references, very easily. And Pat McCauley knew.
My marriage was going through a bad patch at the time and my father had died, in considerable pain and with very little dignity, at the local general hospital. One of my patients, Michelle, told me that her cousin, a famous and very popular Hollywood movie star, was coming to visit for her birthday. Against the advice of every one of my nurses, I decorated the ward with banners saying “Welcome George” while Michelle, now convinced that I was a demon hell-bent upon kidnapping her cousin, shivered in a corner. There was, of course, no movie star. Michelle’s only claim to fame was a distant relationship to a local drug dealer. I went off shift that night, cried for two days solid, and then spent a year on antidepressants. The Wicklow and what had happened there was the reason I was only doing agency work. Not that my casual status, quite obviously, had allowed me to completely escape my past. Pat McCauley and, no doubt, her cronies knew about it, too. I had been, I realised then, very stupid to get involved with Frankie Driscoll and his king of Saudi Arabia. And yet, Michelle and her delusions notwithstanding, I had and have always believed that to dismiss what appears to be a patient’s delusions out of hand is wrong. After all, who am I, or anyone else for that matter, to dictate what is and is not real? Just because a person is “insane” doesn’t mean that he or she is also telling falsehoods. Conversely, the “sane” are not necessarily always truthful. But then, if Pat McCauley was warning me off Frankie Driscoll, why was she doing so? There was nothing in the old man’s file about any property in Cornwall. His father had lived on the waterfront at Padstow in the ‘50s, it was true. That was the address Frankie’d given for his next of kin. But when he’d died the house he had lived in effectively disappeared. Like a lot of poor people, Frankie’s dad had probably rented the place. There was not, or didn’t seem to be, any money and besides, Frankie openly hated his ward manager. If Pat was warning me off, was she, in fact, doing it for my own good? In other words, to help my career to get back on its feet once again?
I thought about this for the few days I spent away from the ward. Frankie, like a lot of long-term patients, had an appointed solicitor, Ray Jenkins, who represented the affairs of several people on the ward. But I knew that even if Mr. Jenkins did know about some cottage in Padstow he wasn’t going to tell me anything about it. Client confidentiality and all that. Maybe Pat McCauley, much as she and her acolytes gave me the creeps, did actually like me?
I went back onto the ward on the following Sunday and was shocked to see how far Frankie had deteriorated. Totally bed-bound now, he was drifting out of consciousness every few minutes. Pat, who was not usually on shift at the weekends, told me, “Doctor says it’s the diabetes out of control.” She looked down at Frankie with sympathetic eyes. “Poor love.”
I sat with him. He opened his eyes a few times, and once, just after the doctor came to do his observations, he looked at me and said, “He’s part of it, old fraud!” But then he lapsed into unconsciousness again. A couple of the other patients had gone home to their relatives for the weekend and so the ward was quiet. Most of the time I was around or near to Frankie’s bed. But then, so was Pat, and Tracey too, and when I left at five they stayed on, with the doctor. The three of them together did make me feel uneasy, but beyond my memories of Frankie’s ramblings there was no real reason why that should have been so. They weren’t doing or saying anything odd or worrying.
The following morning I was booked to return to the Runfold chronic ward again and so I duly turned up at eight for the beginning of my shift. When I first walked onto the ward I was shocked that I couldn’t see Frankie anywhere.
“Pat had him moved to a side ward,” Tracey told me when I asked after the old man. “Took a turn for the worse late last night.”
“Pat was with him? Late?”
Tracey looked into my eyes very steadily. “She cares, Julia,” she said. “Pat is a very dedicated nurse. Nothing’s too much trouble.”
I tried to get into the side room where Frankie was lying, but it was too full of Pat, the doctor, and their very obvious, cooing concern. I got to the office just as the postman arrived. Sorting the post on a ward every morning is a very lowly job, it’s the kind of thing that agency staff do to take a little bit of the pressure off the permanent nurses. And so I shuffled through the letters and postcards for the patients, through the brown official envelopes addressed, largely, to Pat, until I came to a very high-quality envelope with a pretty, foreign stamp. It was from Saudi Arabia and it was addressed to Mr. Francis Driscoll. Without even thinking, I put it straight into the pocket of my trousers.
They just wouldn’t damn well go! Every ten minutes I looked into Frankie’s room and not once was it empty. If it wasn’t the doctor in there, it was the doctor and Pat; if it wasn’t the doctor and Pat, it was Pat and Tracey, or Tracey and Janice, or sometimes the whole lot of them together.
Geoff, who was the only other permanent member of staff on shift, said, “Seems like Frank’s dying, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” I said. “Why, has Pat said or...”
Geoff looked around at the ward with eyes like a frightened rabbit. He then took me to one side and said, “I was on shift last night. I know I shouldn’t do double shifts but we were short and... Some bloke turned up about nine.”
“At night?”
“Yeah. No one said who he was, but then I heard that doctor, Cooper, he said that the bloke was Frank’s solicitor. Well, it happens, doesn’t it,” Geoff said, “When they get near to death. Some of them ask for their solicitor. Even mad people want to make sure everything’s in order when they pass on, don’t they?”
“Yes...”