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.

  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?"

  "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?