The Family Firm

Chapter 49

Frankie had been at Junior's side since he had been admitted. She wouldn't allow herself even a moment for her own self-preservation; the doctors had said that it was a miracle he was even alive, and that he was not "out of the water" yet, as Dr Cheung had put it. They kept him heavily sedated so that his body could heal. Sepsis was a great risk, and he was being closely monitored, by the physicians and Frankie both.

She hadn't gone home since the night of the wedding. She had washed her face in the sink periodically, and Donny had brought her a few toiletries, but knew that she probably stunk. Regardless, she didn't care. Her baby needed her and she wasn't going to let him out of her sight. She told the doctors they would have to drag her out by her hair if they wanted her to leave, and, understanding her trauma, they had for the most part let her alone.

She stayed by his side while they re-dressed his bandages and exchanged intravenous bags. They allowed her to on the grounds that she wouldn't intervene, and she hadn't. But watching Junior like that, lying in his bed, completely unresponsive, made her feel sick.

He looked serene, and his face was slightly bloated and coated with a sheen of oil. It was like looking at a corpse in a coffin. She shook the thought from her mind as soon as it had appeared. Freddie Evans Jr was not going to die, not tonight, and not any night as long as she was still alive. He was a fighter, was her Junior. After all, he had made it this far, had he not? Yes, little Freddie was tough. The boy had survived a fucking gun shot to the liver. He wouldn't let something like infection kill him. The idea was preposterous.

Donny had stayed the first two days, but had gone home after that, to the house in Romford where he had been living with Frankie since the beginning of the year. Even the doctors had told him there was no real reason for either of them to stay. Junior was out and he wouldn't be awake until he was beginning to properly recover. He stopped by to check on them periodically but had delved into his daily walks along the city streets and down to the old dockland. It was what he did to clear his head.

Frankie saw him as a traitor. In the few weeks before the wedding, he had steadily been becoming his old self again, had Donny. That cunt. There wasn't any of the name-calling or the effing and blinding yet, but she knew it was only a matter of time. He sat around day-in, day-out, on his arse, which she noticed was getting fat, no job, as per fucking usual. Oh, he was a treat, wasn't he.

She found it easy to be negative now, easier than it had been. Donny had been there when she had to pick up the pieces of her life, but she knew he was also the reason she had been so broken in the first place. She was starting to hate him. Hated him for how he had treated her in the past, hated him for abandoning her Junior, and she hated her mother for convincing her to fall back into his arms.

And that was just so typical of her dear old mum, too, wasn't it. Always sticking her nose in where it doesn't belong, "for her own good". Well Donny wasn't good for her and, for the hundredth time over, she was realising it.

Even as she sat there in the hospital room, she felt the hatred squeezing around her heart like a fist. Good, she thought. Hang onto that. It was better than the emptiness and depression the attempted murder of her own son had brought. But what she wouldn't admit to herself was the fact that, above all else, she hated herself.

Freddie watched his sister through the open door as she held her son's hand in her own. She was such a strong woman, was his Frankie; she had been staying beside Junior diligently since the beginning, even though it was a terrifying sight to behold.

Every time he saw his nephew, it still came as a shock. There was a number of various tubes sticking out of the boy's hands and arms, and the great breathing mechanism in his mouth. A hard lump formed in Freddie's throat. No one on God's green earth should have to see their own child hooked up to enough monitors to fill a command centre. It was like something out of a science fiction film.