Frankie & Me

by Marie Yates

  Jane helping with my Uni application. I know that she made it so much better by rewriting it for me. She has told me how proud she is of me and that means a lot.

  Mum saying that she will support whatever I decide about Uni. That has taken the pressure off me as I wasn’t sure if she’d push me to move away. I still think that she would like Sammy to move in, but I don’t know if that will happen while I’m still at home. It’s nice to know I can stay if I want to.

  Right now, I’m just grateful to be enjoying life so much, to have awesome people around me, and to be able to see a great future opening up for me. It’s exciting.

  Forty-One

  ‘Jesus, Dani, what did you do that for?’ Mum screamed this morning when she saw me leaning over the sink, getting paler by the second with blood pouring out of my finger.

  ‘It’s not like I did it on purpose. It really hurts.’ I was willing myself not to cry, or be sick. I wanted to do both but couldn’t get my legs to move away from the sink.

  ‘We’re going to have to get you to A & E, just let me phone work.’

  I thought Mum was phoning for an ambulance but no, never mind me losing a river of blood down the sink, she needed to postpone her meeting. ‘Mum, I feel quite ill,’ I said. I must have looked quite ill as she put the phone down and grabbed a tea towel. Wrapping it around my hand she asked me to hold it tight while she fetched her keys, then helped me out to the car.

  ‘Please don’t bleed on the car seat.’

  ‘Seriously? You’re thinking about your meeting and your car when I could be dying here.’ As I said the words I knew that I was exaggerating a little bit, but it really hurt and there was a lot of blood.

  ‘You’ve cut your finger, Dani. I don’t think it’s life threatening. Bleeding on the car seat could be life threatening though, I love this car.’

  It felt like my finger was about to come away from my hand, but I wasn’t going to argue about the definition of a ‘cut’. My focus was on holding the tea towel around my finger and doing my very best not to be sick. I was sure that being sick in the car would be life threatening too.

  The really annoying thing was that I had been trying to be helpful. Being helpful was bad for my health. I had made tuna sandwiches for lunch and Mum had always lectured me on washing the tin for the recycling.

  Her words to me this morning had been, ‘You need to make sure it’s clean, especially so that Reggie doesn’t lick it and cut himself.’ Oh, the irony.

  I’d been washing up the tin and without thinking, had swept my hand around the inside of it. Then I saw the water had turned red followed by a searing rush of pain and, lifting my hand of out the washing up bowl, saw the skin of my index finger falling away from where it should have been.

  The nurse I saw in A & E was much more sympathetic than Mum had been. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll clean that up,’ he told me as I bled on the floor of the triage room. ‘I’m going to have to clean that up which won’t be comfortable and then we’ll stitch you up.’

  ‘Will it take long?’ Mum asked.

  ‘We’ll have you out of here in no time,’ he said to me. ‘Can I interest you in a drink and a sandwich? Tuna?’

  The look on my face said it all.

  ‘Too soon? How about cheese?’

  My appetite never stayed away for long and after a drink and something to eat I started to feel better, but my finger was throbbing. The nurse talked to me while he cleaned it up but I couldn’t reply to what he was saying, I was mumbling, ‘That hurts, that hurts a lot, that really hurts,’ on a loop. He ignored me and carried on talking.

  ‘All done,’ he announced.

  I looked down and saw the world’s smallest bandage around my finger. ‘What about the stitches?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t as bad as it looked, I used Steri-Strips so you’ll just need to make an appointment to see the nurse at your GP’s surgery in a week or so and they’ll check it over for you.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to be happy, or be embarrassed. Is that really it?’ I couldn’t believe that after all that blood, I essentially had a plaster on my finger.

  ‘Is that it?’ Mum repeated as she came back in to take me home. She had made her excuses as soon as the tea towel had been removed. ‘That’s a relief.’

  Thanking the nurse and rushing me back to the car, Mum was wittering on about dropping me off at home and that I’d have to walk to Sixth Form.

  ‘Don’t I get the day off to recover from the trauma?’ I asked, thinking it was worth a try.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your legs or your ears. You can walk to Sixth Form and you can listen.’

  She used the ‘Mum voice’ that I knew not to argue with. ‘Do you think I’ll be able to train?’ I asked, and immediately regretted it.

  ‘So, you can go to taekwondo but you can’t sit in a classroom?’

  Yeah, I knew that was a mistake. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the journey and decided that I would go to Sixth Form, even if it was just to share my near-death experience with my friends and try to get some sympathy.

  ‘That’s the world’s shittiest war wound,’ Frankie said when I arrived at college. She laughed at my bandage questioning whether I really had needed to go to A & E.

  ‘What does it take to get some sympathy around here?’ I whimpered.

  ‘More than a plaster,’ said Maya. ‘I mean, maybe if you had real stitches, or a sling, or a plaster cast we could sign. Not that though, you don’t get any sympathy for that.’

  I gave up. My attention shifted to the fact I might actually not be able to train. It was amazing how motivated I became when I was not able to do something. I’d missed training for loads of stupid reasons, but as soon as I had a genuine reason for not being able to use my hand, I could come up with twenty solutions and ways to make it happen. What was that about?

  Funnily enough, the same thing didn’t happen when it came to finding a way to take notes. ‘I can take a photo of yours, can’t I?’ I pleaded, dropping my pen for dramatic effect.

  ‘Sure, but only this week.’ Frankie smiled. ‘And when I get a paper cut from scribbling your notes, I want sympathy too.’

  ‘Deal.’

  Forty-Two

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Frankie said earlier, a little bit too seriously for my liking.

  I wasn’t sure if she was joking so laughed to lighten the mood and replied, ‘But this way we’ll get to see more of each other. If you’re free too, obviously.’ I realised I had made an assumption that Frankie would work around my new colour-coded schedule.

  I thought it was a brilliant idea. I wanted to do everything in my power to pass the exams, pass my grading and see Frankie and my friends.

  ‘You have actually scheduled me. I have been colour-coded and scheduled.’

  I still couldn’t tell if she was messing around. ‘You’re green, because it’s the colour of your favourite running shoes,’ I said, but that didn’t help.

  She examined my schedule, trying to figure out when our allocated time together would be. ‘Hold on.’ I knew what she had spotted. I was going to ask her about it later on, but it looked like we were going to have the conversation now. ‘This is a green weekend. Well, a Saturday evening and Sunday morning?’

  ‘Mum and Sammy are going away. One of Sammy’s friends is getting married. I thought you might want to come over. You know, stay over. If you want. I know you might be busy.’ I was rambling. I felt silly, she was holding my schedule and it was the most unromantic way I could have thought of to ask her to stay over.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she replied. ‘Maybe I can get on board with the whole schedule thing.’ She kissed me. ‘Reggie will be staying downstairs, won’t he?’

  ‘I think he’ll be okay with that,’ I said, pretty sure he wouldn’t be okay with that. More importantly, I was okay with that. ‘It’s a date then.’

  The moment was shattered by the man himself bouncing into my room and making himself comfortable at the foot
of my bed.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Frankie joked, while picking up his favourite toy and winding him up with it.

  ‘If you weren’t so much fun, he wouldn’t want to spend so much time with you,’ I told her. She couldn’t be grumpy with us when we were complimenting her. ‘Now, piss off because green time has ended and it is now red time.’

  I knew that Frankie had to go to a running club thing anyway, and it wasn’t like I would rather do my Psychology essay than spend time with her. I was impressed that I had almost made it through the first day of my schedule though, and I was on target.

  With a final throw of Reggie’s favourite toy, Frankie got up to leave, creating a pathway of destruction thanks to her rubbish aim.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a colour code for tidying up Reggie’s mess,’ she said as she headed for the door.

  ‘His colour is brown, you can guess why.’ I laughed. I knew she would think it was poo bag related, but he was actually brown because it was the colour of his favourite toy. I followed Frankie downstairs.

  ‘I’m such a loser,’ I said to Reggie, after waving goodbye to Frankie. ‘I don’t care though, you love me, don’t you?’

  Wagging his tail and dropping his toy at my feet I whispered, ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

  I was nervous and excited that I had asked Frankie about staying over. We both knew what that meant and I was relieved she was so relaxed about it. That had helped me feel less pressured, but my head was already overthinking everything.

  ‘Schedule, just stick to the schedule or you won’t get anything done,’ I told myself, heading for the kitchen and not back my room.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘Mum, you made me jump,’ I shouted. ‘I didn’t hear you come home.’

  ‘Is Frankie here?’ she asked. ‘Or are you having a deep and meaningful conversation with Reggie?’

  ‘I was talking to myself,’ I admitted. ‘I’m trying to talk myself into writing an essay.’

  ‘I’ll make tea and bring you a snack to help you while you’re writing. We don’t want you having another kitchen related accident, do we?’

  That was a result. I hadn’t factored in the extra time it would take for me to type while my hand was sore and swollen though. It was annoying that it hurt so much and I only had a little plaster and a swollen bruise to show for it. Sitting at my desk and typing with one hand made essay writing even less fun than usual. I didn’t think that was possible.

  Forty-Three

  That was the most amazing weekend.

  After winding myself up into what I can only describe now as panic, I almost cancelled. I wrote messages saying I was feeling poorly, saying I was sick and even one saying that I needed to take Reggie to the vet. I deleted that one as quickly as possible as Mum would say I was tempting fate.

  The thing is, I did feel sick! My head was spinning and I had questions going over and over in my mind. ‘Do I feel like this because it’s not what I want?’ ‘Do I feel like this because I don’t want to be with Frankie?’ ‘Am I ready for this?’

  ‘If in doubt, don’t.’ These were always Jane’s words of wisdom when I questioned my actions. She would follow that up with a lecture about not avoiding things I really did want to do, so I was never really sure whether to take her advice or not.

  In the end I looked at my phone, ready to send a message to tell Frankie I wasn’t feeling well when her name popped up on the screen. ‘Can’t wait 2 c u, got pizza and ur fave film x.’

  In a heartbeat, the pressure went away again. I really wanted to see her and knew that we could just chill out and see what happened. Maybe it was that simple.

  It was that simple.

  Waking up with Frankie was the most incredible start to the day. I was worried that I would feel awkward or embarrassed, that something might have changed or that being close to someone would bring back feelings that I never wanted to experience again.

  That couldn’t be further from the reality.

  Right now, I feel like the luckiest girl on the planet.

  Forty-Four

  ‘Believe me, I don’t want to go either,’ I said to Frankie earlier today while I was packing to go to Jane’s for a couple of days.

  ‘You’ll have a lot more fun if you stay here with me.’

  ‘I know that. That’s why I don’t want to go!’ I admitted, knowing that she was right, but that I would also be setting myself up to fail my exams as there was no way I’d choose revision over seeing her at that moment. ‘It’s not for long, and I’d have more time if I didn’t have to go and get this stupid hand checked over first.’

  Frankie was only supposed to be staying for a few minutes on her way to training, but an hour had passed and Mum was getting grumpy.

  ‘We’re going to be late, Dani. Have you packed your bag?’ She was going to have a break with Sammy once she’d abandoned me at Jane’s and didn’t want to be held up by the GP appointment either. While they were off to the Lakes with my dog, I was being sent to Jane’s for a final pre-exam boot camp. I had done my best to convince them all that Reggie wanted to come with me, but even he hadn’t look convinced that boot camp at Jane’s would be more fun than walking the hills with Mum. He had a point!

  ‘That’s my cue to leave,’ Frankie said as she raced to the door.

  ‘You’re coming for dinner next weekend, aren’t you Frankie?’ Mum shouted before she could escape. ‘Jane’s looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘Would miss it for the world, Mrs M, enjoy your holiday.’ Frankie winked at us and left.

  I knew she was nervous about meeting Jane. When I’d invited her to join us all for dinner her first response had been, ‘That’s going to be scarier than meeting your mum.’

  ‘You met my mum ages ago,’ I’d said, a bit confused.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s different now. This is like an official meet the girlfriend thing. What if she doesn’t like me, or can read my mind and she tells you what I’m thinking.’

  ‘I know what you’ll be thinking.’ I’d laughed. ‘You’ll be deciding between pizza or burger and chips on the menu.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  I was pretty sure that Jane would like Frankie. There was nothing not to like, but I supposed I was biased.

  Mum jerked me back from my daydream. She had a magical way of killing them. ‘Seriously, Dani. GET IN THE CAR!’

  Mum spent most of the appointment at the GP’s checking her watch while the nurse was trying to explain to us both that my hand had healed well but there would be a small scar.

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Mum’s not bothered about a scar and I’ll make up a cool story about how it happened.’ I felt a little bit embarrassed by Mum’s behaviour and wondered when I’d turned into the parent.

  ‘You were really rude,’ I said as we left.

  ‘We’re late. You need to get to Jane’s and I need to go and enjoy myself.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re all set for enjoying yourself,’ I whispered, knowing that now was not the time to make any jokes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just need to have a couple of days away from work and I don’t mean to take it out on you.’

  I forgot that Mum had her own stuff going on. I had no idea what was happening at her work, and I wasn’t sure I’d understand if she told me.

  ‘You’ll be able to forget all about it with your two favourite men,’ I said. ‘And I hear there’s a lot of sheep shit for Reggie to enjoy in the Lakes, so you’ll be kept busy. Did you pack his wet wipes?’

  ‘I bought extra,’ she said, finally looking a bit more relaxed.

  The second that Mum had closed Jane’s front door, I heard the words, ‘You had a good weekend with Frankie then?’

  How does she do it? How does she know everything?

  ‘Yeah, it was good, thanks,’ I said, desperately trying to sound relaxed while my face turned the colour of a post box.

  ‘I’ll be having the “hurt her and I
’ll hurt you” chat with her at the weekend, I think,’ Jane teased.

  ‘Don’t you dare. Anyway, you’d need Lucy’s help to kick her arse, not that you’d be able to catch her, she’s a runner.’

  ‘I’ll think of something. As long as she doesn’t hurt you, I won’t need to ask Lucy to kick her arse.’ She softened and smiled at me as she added, ‘I’m so glad you’re happy.’

  I am happy. Last time I was at Jane’s, I was relieved that I had some time to escape the pressure of getting closer to Frankie. This time, I’d give anything to be with her. The pressure was only in my head, it was a combination of fear and of not trusting my gut. If I had relaxed and let myself think things through rationally rather than panicking and overthinking it all, I’d have saved myself a lot of headaches.

  Maybe I should relax and go with the flow more often. I’ve been told a few times that I need to learn to trust my gut feeling and my instincts. What’s the worst that can happen if I’m honest with myself? If the weekend with Frankie taught me anything, it’s that going with the flow can be a lot more fun than overthinking!

  ‘Missing you x,’ I send to Frankie.

  ‘Right bak attcha x,’ she replies.

  Forty-Five

  I think I needed the break at Jane’s. It wasn’t until I had my first lie-in in weeks that I realised how tired I was. It wasn’t just feeling like crap that had drained my energy, feeling great had been quite overwhelming too. It wasn’t a bad thing, but Jane explained that it was easy to forget that you still need to rest, even when you were feeling brilliant.

  ‘It’s like a rollercoaster, Dani,’ she said, knowing that I loved a superfast rollercoaster and she hated them. ‘If we were both sitting at the top of the big dipper, waiting for it to drop at lightning speed, how would you feel?’

  I could feel my body responding as I thought about it. ‘I’d be excited, my heart would be racing, I’d be sweating and my stomach would be doing somersaults.’ I was feeling these things as I replied. I was talking faster and more animated, wishing there was a rollercoaster nearby.