“Driving Frankie to Detox”

 by Lisette Abrahams

 

Frankie is scrunched up on the back seat. Hood up. Head down. Knees pulled up to neck, legs locked between skinny wrists. All ankles and knuckles. His trackie bottoms are too short, and in the gap between seam and sock I see the shock of his white-blue shins, skin thin as a Rizla. Last week in clinic, I weighed Frankie. He was just under seven stone. Frankie is over six foot.

 

In the passenger seat, Frankie’s dad pretends to enjoy himself, gazing at the scenery like a pensioner on a coach party day trip. We ascend the hill and the mist clears, revealing fields and hedges rolling down to the coast. “Look Frankie! The sea!” Frankie does not look. He is folding inwards, making his tall frame small. Trying to disappear.

 

Last time I drove this way was early this summer, taking my two boys to Butlins for the Bob the Builder show. From their car seats, little legs kicked as they shouted to each other: “Can we fix it? Yes we can!” The day, full of such promise, was not a success. As soon as he appeared, the oversized Bob figure terrified my younger son, and when Bob’s voice boomed out, he burst into tears. “I want to go home, Mummy”.The show had barely begun.       

 

In my rearview mirror, I see that Frankie is rattling. Eyes and nose starting to stream, scarred arms pricking with goosebumps. Frankie tells me to stop the car, says he needs a piss. I shake my head, “No.” Frankie doesn’t need a piss. Frankie wants a fix. He raises his head and looks towards the door. Frankie is thinking about running. Even though we are doing sixty and are surrounded by fields, he is thinking about lifting that handle, opening the door, and legging it. I click the child locks on.

 

We are all so tired. I have come to dread turning my phone on in the mornings. Missed calls from Frankie’s dad, messages left at midnight, at 2.17, at 3.59. Frankie has gone. Frankie has come back. Frankie has stolen his mum’s jewellery, has taken my bank card, has broken our hearts. Can you help us get our boy back?

 

Next to me, Frankie’s dad clutches a 5p carrier bag, and through its thin plastic stripes I can see what he has brought to give to his son. Lynx body wash. Lucozade sports drink. A Mars bar. As if Frankie is going on his first overnight school trip. All of this will be confiscated, but I do not tell Frankie’s dad. Frankie is starting to shake. He asks if we can stop for a fag. I shake my head, “No. You can have a fag when we get there, once you’re checked in.”

 

We are so close. So close. But we have been this close before. Closer even. Last time, Frankie refused to get out of the car. The time before that, he bolted from home half an hour before I turned up. I have tried. I have asked the right questions. The first time, in the front room of Frankie’s mum and dad’s house, when his mum brought me tea in a china cup, and homemade cake, as if I was Frankie’s new girlfriend. As if I wasn’t asking him how much heroin he was using, and whether his injecting sites were infected. I have asked Frankie the right questions in the police station, in the young offender’s unit, in the locked ward. Now I don’t ask questions. I make statements. “Run out of options.” “The end of the road.” “No choice.”

 

None of this makes any difference. Neither does pleading, or begging, or bribing. I know this. Frankie’s dad knows this, but if it comes to it, he will plead and beg and bribe again. Because Frankie’s dad is desperate.

 

We are on the right road now. If my kids were strapped in the back seat, bored, I would say brightly, “Nearly there!” Frankie knows we are close, and he is terrified. A B&B sign propped up in a lace-curtained window advertises vacancies. “Perhaps I can come down and see you, Frankie!” his dad says, pointing at the sign. “Stay the night and make a break of it. Take you on the pier. Buy you a candyfloss!”
We pull up outside and I turn off the engine, unlock the doors. Frankie does not move. His dad clutches the carrier bag. No one says anything. We wait. We wait for Frankie to decide.

Suddenly he seizes the handle and pushes the door open, then swings those long thin legs onto the gravel drive. Shoulders hunched, head down, he walks towards the entrance. Frankie’s dad looks at me, exhales. This is progress.

I’m not sure he’ll last the first night.

In the reception area, I give Frankie’s name and we are told to take a seat. Frankie’s dad nudges him. “Take your hood down, Frankie!” Frankie scowls, stares at his feet. A door opens, and a young man appears. He is younger than Frankie, but not so thin. He carries a tray carefully, his tongue sticking out as he concentrates. It is a tray of tea and biscuits. Sugar bowl. Teapot. China cups. Done properly. He hands Frankie a cup of tea, but Frankie is shaking so much that the cup rattles, and tea sloshes over the sides into the saucer. The young man ignores this, stares at Frankie’s feet.  “Nice trainers’ mate” he says.

Frankie raises his head and smiles.

 

“Saved by the Atom Bomb”

by Gerry Dempsey

 

Hidden behind the horizon of eastern mountains, the morning sun crusted the underbellies of sparse clouds with a yellow-orange glow. Dull light exposed rice fields stretching from a small town in the Akitakata valley to stack into the distant hills. Sprinkled across the grey fields, farmers in pointed reed hats bobbed arched backs in the soft glow of lantern light. Their morning toil started before the heat would drive them to seek shelter.

Jun slid the shoji doors of his bedroom open and sat at the open window. A chorus of invisible birds ignored his racket. He lit a cigarette and pulled on it until the end glowed red. Under a canopy of garden trees, he watched with interest the battle between light and dark just beyond the horizon, as though he was unsure of what the outcome might be. He hoped the dark might defy the odds and he could stay hidden. Out of sight of prying eyes and the inevitable knock on his door. A heavy knock, a military summons, that would surely come. If not today, tomorrow at the latest.

Humidity in the still warm air drew a sheen of glistening sweat on his chest and he drew his palm slowly across the tatami floor. He could feel the weight of the unopened letter he received two days earlier in his pocket. The burden of responsibility and duty, stressed by the authority of the chrysanthemum stamp on the envelope. The contents were a death sentence he preferred not to read. He blew smoke into the air and suddenly ripped the letter open, and the first sunbeams caught the terse orders in a fiery glow.

 

Military Headquarters of the Western Imperial Army       July 31^st, 1945

Enlistment Division, Kobe

To Jun Okawa.

You will report to the Akitakata camp by August 5^th to fight for the glory of the empire and the emperor.

Major Hiroshi Yamato,

Commander of the 4^th Battalion

 

Jun’s first eighteen years growing up on his father’s farm, and working the nearby fields were barely a memory. His mind filled with the carnage and death from the recent two years he spent in the Pacific. His deployment in the south ended abruptly on a battlefield in the Dutch East Indies, and he returned home with only one leg, a sorrowful, useless failure. Now the Americans drew closer, and it seemed the emperor sifted through the dregs for one legged men to defend the rice fields in Japan from the approaching heathen army.

He clutched the imperial command in his fist and ground his teeth. He would not die, a forgotten soldier, in Okinawa or Kyushu or anywhere else. He would not return to hell on earth. This was his great grandfather’s land, his birthplace, and the earth of his ancestor’s home would cradle his body in death.

He blew smoke from his nostrils and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the nearby gravel. He reached for his crutches and pulled himself up. The end of a dangling noose of rope caught his eye and he stared at the tool of death hanging from the eaves outside his window. The soft glow of the birthing sun prickled his skin and met his final wish. It was time.

He limped to his futon, unspoiled by sleep, and reached under his pillow to extract a farewell letter to his mother and sister. He read it one last time.

 

Dearest Mother and Haruka-chan,

You are the light in my darkness. You are my strength in the fiery breath of war. My broken body saddles you with a load you don’t deserve, and my tortured mind drains my will to live. A shame you will no longer need to bear. Please forgive my selfishness and remember me as your devoted son and loving brother.

Jun.

 

He placed the folded note on top of the pillow, and carefully arranged its edge to line parallel with the futon. To the side, he placed the wrinkled and torn letter from the army. He fixed a crease on the bedding and stared at the stitches of his mother’s embroidery. Tears welled in his eyes as he traced the stitching with his fingers. She deserved a fallen hero, not a burdensome broken son. He looked at his closed room door and a sudden urge to hug his younger sister squeezed the air from his lungs. He swallowed the urge, blinked away his self-pity, and steeled himself for the job at hand. The clock on the wall ticked a loud tick-tock countdown and he noticed it was already ten past eight. It was time. He cleared his throat and turned sharply to the window once more.

Balancing on his leg, he stretched the noose over his head until it sat across his Adam’s apple. He looked to the majestic mountains, illuminated in the morning sun, and leaned forward. The rope squeezed and pressed on his neck, and he ground his teeth in determination. The sound of the birds had disappeared, and an eerie silence enveloped the house, broken by the creak of the eaves, the relentless clock, and the scratching on the tatami as he teetered on the ball of his only foot. He was just one final gentle push away from the end.

A flash of light brighter than the sun lit the blue sky, and he shut his eyes. His one leg still bore most of his weight and he blinked an eye open. Jun squinted at a cloud of smoke rising from the mountain tops and he grasped the rope with both hands. He watched as the smoke rose and spread like a giant shitake mushroom. He recalled the rumours of a weapon of incredible power. Rumours laughed at by the officers and feared by the men. The silent smoke cloud spread rapidly in the blue sky beyond the mountains over the city of Hiroshima. Jun tasted his salty tears and tore the rope from his throat.

~~~

Party Games

by Alison Wassell

 

“Fuck the lot of them,” Mum says, when nobody from school turns up to my thirteenth birthday party. The only guests are Nan and Mrs Walsh from next door who sit at either end of the sofa with their handbags on their knees like a pair of bookends. Perfectly synchronised, they suck in their breath.

Mum pulls a scarf out of her handbag and blindfolds me. Anger and wine fumble her fingers but somehow she ties a too-tight knot. She spins me round one, two, three, four times, her Scarlet Harlot painted nails digging into my skin. When she lets go I stagger like a drunk.

“Catch me if you can,” she calls, from far away. I stick my arms out and do a zombie walk, pretending I’m having fun, that I’m not way too old for party games, that all this is completely normal.

I have no idea whereabouts in the room I am until the sofa helps me out by squeaking as either Nan or Mrs Walsh shifts. I meet it too soon and topple over onto Nan. I know it’s her, because she smells of Silk Cut and she says, “Get off me, yer fat lump.” I roll into the space in the middle of the sofa. Mrs Walsh smells of old ladies’ perfume, baking, mint imperials, and ever so slightly of dried wee. If my head could find her shoulder, if I knew for sure she wouldn’t jerk away, I would rest it there.

“No birthday tea until you find me,” Mum shouts. On my feet again I sway and lurch, a seasick sailor groping for something safe and solid and finding only space. “You’re getting colder,” Mum says, over and over. I trip, end up with my nose nuzzling the carpet, and lie there, because at least I can’t fall any further, inhaling cat hair and biscuit crumbs. Behind my blindfold I imagine a celebratory tower of cupcakes, a sober set of parents, something resembling ordinary. My mouth fills with the taste of metal as I realise I have bitten my tongue.

“You win,” I say.

The noise behind me tells me there will be no birthday tea. I pull off the blindfold. Mum is, magician-like, brandishing the tablecloth. The carpet is strewn with peanuts, the remains of last night’s pizza, yellow-stickered cakes from the Co-op, and one of Mrs Walsh’s apple pies.

“That’s another birthday you’ve ruined,” she says.

Nan goes out to the yard for a ciggie and Mum sits on the back step, swigging the last of her wine straight from the bottle. I curl up on the sofa and Mrs Walsh lets me use her lap as a cushion. Her chest is whistling like an old-fashioned kettle, and I hope she won’t die before I can tell her how much I love her. She strokes my hair with her arthritis-swollen fingers and, just for a moment, I feel as close to happy as I have ever been.

“Fuck the pair of them, if you’ll pardon my French,” she says.

~~~