Lightning Rod

A tall man stands in rainfall looking up at a dirty window in a dirty street. It is a biblical deluge and there is no other soul abroad. He buries his hands deeper in his pockets and flinches when a streak of lighting appears in the sky. It forks towards a downbeat hotel and is unmanned by a lightning rod on the roof. Ten seconds later there is an ionised charge of thunder. This too is biblical and fearful, like the galloping hoofs of the apocalypse. His daughter is here somewhere, and this somewhere is nowhere any father wants his daughter to be.

A couple of miles away, Pat is in her kitchen chopping chicken fillets into bite-sized cubes. The vegetables are prepped, the oven is warming. Casserole with roast potatoes, enough for five, although there is never a pot big enough. Upstairs she can hear low music, and from a slightly different source, her son playing FIFA, shouting at an avatar referee. Three kids upstairs: two of them unproblematic. They won’t set the world on fire, but who needs an arsonist in the family? The youngest, though, Millie, is trouble and strife, and has been nothing but all her life. 

She washes up, watching her reflection in the window above the sink. It is black. It is cold. It is pouring down. And then comes the thunder, deeper than the usual rumble. She remembers being taught the 30/30 rule at school, wondering why it was necessary to know this in a country with such sedate weather. Hardly Florida. But still, it’s good to know the 30/30 rule if you’re on a golf course. 

She sees the lightning flash from the window, and the thunder came just seven seconds later. Dangerous times to be outside. Right now, this storm is directly overhead, and she thinks of Rod. And she thinks to call Rod, although he might be driving home. The call goes to VM. He’s driving home. Keep him safe. 

She opens a bottle of red, and slips a glug into the casserole for depth. She hears Aaron cry out ‘Whooaaa!’ as another streak of lightning strobes up the house. Nineteen, and he still gets excited by snow and big weather. No sounds from the girls’ rooms. Holly will be plugged into ear phones and revising. Good kid. No sound from Millie, bad kid, because Millie is probably asleep. She does a lot of that. 

The red wine burns on her empty stomach. She knows it doesn’t help with the anxiety, (which her mother called nerves), but when that monster begins to gnaw, that little burn is worth it. Have some of that! Wine and food. Not too much food, and just a small glass of wine, but enough to fill up her stomach so the nerves get less room to agitate.

How is it possible, she thinks, to raise three kids in the same house with the same father using the same methods, and to have one so unaccountably outré? These private thoughts shame her, but it is true to say that Pat loves Millie but she doesn’t like her one little bit. And the other mothers, the ones from the primary school cohort, flick their pitiful glances her way and gossip about parenting techniques. Pat knows it’s the luck of the draw. When you have a kid like Millie it is necessary to believe that some brains just don’t conform to standard rules of engagement - and whether you read to them at bedtime, (and Pat did do that), makes no damned difference at all.

She has three teenagers and expects a hard time, but Aaron and Holly are pretty straightforward: the usual flare-ups, but nothing earth-shaking. Millie, though, was a demon from the word go. It is hard to imagine that a baby might be sly, but there was always that about her: getting her own way, slamming her spoon on the highchair, sucking up to whoever was most likely to grant her favours, like a cat. 

And this past few months there has been a pervasive smell of bud coming from her room. They stopped giving her pocket money, and yet the smell remains. Where’s she getting it from? And you know, these parents with normal kids will say: ground her, put a tracker on her phone, don’t give her a phone, drag her to school in the mornings, don’t give in. But Millie’s not a dog, and you cannot manhandle a teenager from her bed and clothe her while her body kicks in defiance. You can threaten bad outcomes if she doesn’t go to school and sometimes it works. Sometimes she leaves the house, cussing and slamming, but she doesn’t get to the school gate. They downloaded the find my iPhone? app, but Millie deleted it.

The calls from her form teacher are a torture for her. His calm, measured sympathy emphasises most acutely that she is a crap mother, and the worry and anxiety darkens her, because the real, balanced truth is that Millie's also a crap kid.

When the casserole starts to smell good, she calls Rod again. It doesn’t go to VM this time. This time there is a clipped voice telling her that the number is unavailable. Maybe he’s holed up somewhere until the storm passes. Maybe he’s with another woman, this imaginary presence which Pat has no proof of. She doesn’t let her mind veer too far down the other avenues, although the presence of those thoughts are keenly felt. 

What if something has happened to Rod? 

The storm is persistent. It doesn’t want to roll away somewhere else but seems intent on pissing on this nondescript town. Yet when the casserole is bubbling and she calls the kids down for tea, the storm moves on, and another kind of storm takes its place. That’s when she realises that Millie isn’t in her room, and that’s when she gets a knock on the door. 

Rod was hit by lightening, standing in a street in an insalubrious part of town. There’s a little tell in the policeman’s left eyebrow, a nudge, nudge, wink, wink innuendo. Kerb-crawling in a storm - who does that? And they tried to call her but Rod’s phone has melted, so they found his address by other means which Pat isn’t interested in knowing.

She tells them her fifteen-year-old daughter is missing and not answering her phone. They take details, but they’re not too concerned. She can tell. Sexual predation in a storm - who does that? She’ll be home, they say. You know what teenagers are like. 

Not knowing where your teenager is - who does that? 

She takes Aaron with her to the hospital and asks Holly to stay home and let her know immediately if Millie returns. Aaron, who instinctively believes his father will be alright, (despite that lightning is six times hotter than the surface of the sun), muses that Rod is an appropriate name for someone struck by lightning. Pat recalls making a joke of it herself in the past. Rod always gets a little spark from the car door and on the rare occasions he runs the vacuum over the carpet. 

The police had a witness, watching from another dirty window on the other side of the street. He said it was side-flash that got him. It split a tree in half and then arced towards her husband. Some of the bark got embedded in his side, and if his electrocution had not been witnessed, he could have bled out on the street. Or died of hypothermia. Aaron is scrolling the effects of a lightning strike on the human body, and he is not so flippant now.

The hospital seems relatively quiet, or at least the storm has kept the worried-well from A&E. Rod’s in a private room, under observation and in an induced coma. The nurse, and then later the doctor, tells them that the coma thing is nothing to worry about. It’s standard procedure. But she said, before she opened the door, that he might look a bit odd. His body is covered in Lichterberg figures, or lightning flowers, which trace the path the electricity took when his capillaries ruptured. ‘It will fade soon,’ the nurse reassured them. 

Pat is not a squeamish woman but Aaron is clearly a squeamish boy, and bursts into tears. It’s not just the weird marbled veins but the drip bags and the monitors and the absence of him. This young man is witnessing his first signs of trouble in an untroubled life, and he deals with it well. He strokes his father’s hand and makes a joke about lightning rods. 

But the boy’s hungry and unsure of his role, so Pat sends him home in a taxi. Tells him, like she told Holly, to call at the first sign of Millie’s appearance. If she isn’t back by the morning, Pat will demand the police take action and she won’t take no for an answer. 

She sits in a chair all night, drinking bad vending coffee and taking the occasional cigarette - just to get some fresh air. 

At five in the morning the bird’s start singing in the dark. They’ve been slowly taking him off the coma meds, and when he opens his eyes and sees Pat sitting there, he smiles. 

‘Do you remember what happened?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I was kicked by a mule,’ he said. 

‘What were you doing there, Rod?’ she asks gently. ‘The police think you’re a punter.’ 

‘Hmm. I was looking for Millie.’

‘Why would Millie be there?’ she asks, but the terrible truth dawns when she’s saying it.

‘That little bag she carries everywhere ….’

Pat knows the little bag. Every time she tries to look in it, she finds it empty, like Mille’s stashed things away. 

‘I put a tracker in it. It led me there.’ And then he looked at her, really looked at her. ‘I need to sleep,’ he said. ‘And so do you. You look like shit.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘Don’t go off half-cock, Pat,’ he says. ‘I think our little girl’s in serious trouble. The big man treats her like his special little girlfriend before putting her out on the streets. That’s my guess, any way.’ 

Pat had already joined those dots. The bud, and what else was she on? 

‘We’ll sort it out,’ she said, kissing his cheek. ‘She’ll come good.’

But she wasn’t sure about that. And as she walked out to the car, there were two things having an all out bar fight in her mind: glass breaking, chairs flying. The first is that she wants to shake Millie until her fucking teeth rattle. She wants to slap her so hard it leaves a mark - and she has never laid a finger on her kids. 

The second is, what would a good mother do? 

It starts to rain again, and her mobile rings. It’s Aaron telling her that Millie’s home and gone straight to her room. She looks really rough and she doesn’t smell good. He says she’s high as a kite. Also tells her they saved her some casserole. Pat turns the car into a church carpark and stands in the rain until she’s drenched. No reason for it. None at all. 

She’s got it figured out by the time she gets home. She’ll get her into rehab, but she’s only paying for it once. They need to catch her while they can. After that, if it doesn’t work, then Millie will have to figure out being Millie somewhere else, because she knows how this shit show usually ends. 

But when she gets home, something happens. Something contrary. Millie is in the kitchen eating the rest of the casserole. She has showered, taken out her piercing studs, and washed her face of makeup. Millie, in fact, looks just like the third child Pat had always longed for. 

She was, she really was, prepared to say that her father would not have been standing in that spot at that particular time if it hadn’t be for her, for Millie. If Millie hadn’t been such a selfish, stupid, needy cow. But there is never a time when that is right or appropriate, because she only has to look at Millie’s face to see that she already knows. 

Pat slides her phone across the table with the rehab information. Millie reads it and looks at her mother. ‘There’s no need,’ she said. ‘I know what I’ve done. Will Dad be alright?’

‘We don’t know,’ Pat said. ‘He might have troubles ahead and he might not.’ 

‘Can I go and see him today?’ 

‘Of course. Just, I need to sleep first. Can I trust you while I’m doing that?’ 

And Millie says she’ll go by herself, and even though Pat thinks she might just go back to the bad man in the dirty street, she needs to sleep. She has to sleep. And when she's done that, she's calling the police. Millie might well find another bad man, but it sure as hell won't be that one.

But as her daughter walks to the gate, without the usual attitude, Pat catches up with her and cups her daughter’s chin in her hands. ‘Didn’t you hear that tree split in the lightning? Didn’t it make you look out the window?’

And Millie looks back at her mother, and for the first time there is something almost truthful in her.

‘No, mum, because I was unconscious. And I don’t know what happened to me.’ 

Millie walks towards the bus stop and Pat, dishevelled, tired, hungry, worried, nervy, catches up with her daughter again, this time taking her by the elbows.

‘You’re not Amy Winehouse,’ she says. ‘And you will go to rehab.’ 

Millie waits for her deranged mother to leave before crossing the road, away from the bus stop that would take her to the hospital, and towards the bus stop that will take her to the big man in the dirty flat in the dirty street. She reapplies her makeup, and that song her mother's put in her head is playing on her mind.

When the bus stops, and the rain comes down again in vertical sheets, she is singing to herself, 'No, No, No.'