A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale

enquiries with a glance, Dot left father and daughter in the hall and put him straight to bed.
     
     
    It was by the sheerest fluke she had even found out he was ill. The daughter of a woman in her book group was a junior nurse on the psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter and recognized Phuc, despite his name, as she had been in the year below him at Cape Cornwall. She took the initiative, when he came round from sedation and finally started making sense. He had claimed to have no next of kin, but she went behind the ward sister’s back and rang her mother, who rang Dot.
    Dot was late back because she had to wait to talk to a doctor. They had explained that he showed signs of addiction to amphetamines, which had left needle tracks, and sclerotic veins, on both his arms. He had been brought in temporarily psychotic from the effects of crystal meth. It had taken three policemen to control him sufficiently to get him into the back of a van and bring him in and it had taken a large dose of Largactil to sedate him to the point of safety and stop him repeatedly shouting, ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m the Son of God!’
    Phuc had looked merely unkempt at Christmas but now his appearance had deteriorated shockingly. He was emaciated, sweaty, dirty and had the sort of acne he had managed to avoid throughout his teens. Dot’s only thought, her instinct, had been to bring him straight home without trying to collect his things. She dressed him in Barnaby’s pyjamas and Barnaby found her weeping over the state of his clothes as she put them to wash with agricultural quantities of liquid soap. Neither she nor Barnaby slept much that night because she kept tiptoeing across to his old room to check he was still there and still breathing.
    He stayed in bed for two whole days, barely speaking, only waking to drink and to toy with the meals she took in to him. They made sure one of them or Carrie was always in the house so that he was never alone and had their GP look in on him too. On the third day he dressed in the basic clothes Barnaby had bought in one of the big supermarkets in Penzance and supplemented with a bag of more colourful things from charity shops. He sat in the garden, enjoying the sun and the cat, whose wordless love was doubtless welcome respite from the anxious expressions of the humans in the house. They conducted small, careful conversations about unthreatening matters in the present: the garden, the weather, the house, the cat. When Barnaby went to sit with him, Phuc would give a crumpled smile and say, ‘Hey, Dad,’ which made Barnaby feel things might be bad but were not quite broken.
    He was more forthcoming with Carrie, admitting to having flunked his course, to being expelled from his hall of residence for stupid stuff, to living in a squat whose address he claimed not to be able to remember. To having no money left, and owing some to a man who scared him. He was nervous the hospital would know his parents’ address and pass it on so that the man might come after him.
    ‘It won’t all be true,’ Dot said, poring over the booklet the nurses had given her. ‘We can expect paranoia and mood swings, it says.’
    ‘It’s so good to see you,’ they told him, and ‘You must stay as long as you like.’
    ‘I don’t care about his degree,’ Barnaby told Dot in bed that night. ‘Or the police or anything. I just want him to stay here and get well, however long it takes.’ And he dared imagine a few sunny weeks, months even, of having both their adult children back in the nest, of Phuc rebuilding his health and his family relationships, with them in careful, loving, undemanding attendance; a prolonged and peaceful rehabilitation.
    He knew this was naïve and that addiction was something about which he was shamefully ignorant for someone who had prided himself on taking a pastoral interest in the more wretched and less law-abiding households of the parish. At the end of the second day of sun and