My Lovely Frankie

  PRAISE FOR JUDITH CLARKE

  MY LOVELY FRANKIE

  ‘An achingly heartfelt story about the loves that shape our lives, and the people who show us the beauty of the world’

  — Will Kostakis

  THREE SUMMERS

  ‘Judith Clarke’s prose is breathtakingly beautiful and she has the gift of rendering emotions exquisitely’

  — Magpies

  THE WINDS OF HEAVEN

  ‘I was most struck by the deftness, beauty and originality of Clarke’s imagery – a wonderful novel, which deserves a wide readership’

  — Bookseller and Publisher

  ONE WHOLE AND PERFECT DAY

  ‘Clarke’s sharp, poetic prose evokes each character’s inner life with rich and often amusing vibrancy’

  — The Horn Book

  KALPANA’S DREAM

  ‘This novel is a hymn to the importance of imagination in our lives’

  — Australian Book Review

  STARRY NIGHTS

  ‘Clarke has woven a fine tale of grief and mystery – the deft plotting and effective build-up of suspense keep readers guessing about events’

  — Booklist

  WOLF ON THE FOLD

  ‘a beautifully crafted, thoughtful and rewarding book’

  — Viewpoint

  ALSO BY JUDITH CLARKE

  Angels Passing By

  Night Train

  The Lost Day

  The Heroic Life of Al Capsella

  Al Capsella and the Watchdogs

  Al Capsella on Holidays

  Friend of My Heart

  The Boy on the Lake

  Panic Stations

  The Ruin of Kevin O’Reilly

  Luna Park at Night

  Big Night Out

  Wolf on the Fold

  Starry Nights

  Kalpana’s Dream

  One Whole and Perfect Day

  The Winds of Heaven

  Three Summers

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  Copyright © Judith Clarke 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760296339

  eISBN 9781760638689

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  ‘Give me a thousand kisses’ is from Poem 5, ‘Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love’ by the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus

  ‘Falling in Love Again’ is the English name for a German song composed by Friedrich Hollaender, with English lyrics by Sammy Lerner, sung by Marlene Dietrich ‘Hushabye’, traditional song

  Cover and text design by Karen Scott Book Design

  Cover photo by Shutterstock, papers by The Hungry Jpeg

  Set by Karen Scott Book Design

  For Yask

  Contents

  1. NOW

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

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  18.

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  22.

  23.

  24.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MORE WONDERFUL BOOKS BY JUDITH CLARKE

  1. NOW

  It’s a late summer evening and I’m out on the veranda on the swing seat Miri sent me. They call them gliders in America, she wrote. Like fruit bats, eh? Anyway, I saw it in the window of Montgomery’s last time I went into town—they were having a garden display: deckchairs and lounges and these swings, all under a big sign that said ‘Summer’s Ease’, and I pictured you out on the veranda on a warm evening, taking your ease, Tom, dreaming away.’

  Dreaming was underlined. She thinks I do a lot of that. Miri’s my cousin, my only cousin, though if I had a hundred of them, she’d still be my favourite. We first met when I was five and she was nine, and straight off, I loved her. I loved the way she looked: the small tanned face and big dark eyes, the springy curls, the sudden amazing smile. I loved the way she moved, always on the point of breaking into a dance. She lived with my Aunty Sarah and Uncle Joe on a property in the north, and when she was leaving us that first time I stood at the barrier with my parents and watched her walking across the tarmac, back very straight, holding fast to Aunty Sarah’s hand. When they reached the small plane they turned and waved, then Aunty Sarah went up the steps and Miri followed, still with her back to me; she ran up two steps and then sprang round to wave again (this time, I knew, just for me), then two steps more, another turn, another wave, right up to the top, where the hostess grabbed her hand and whisked her out of sight. ‘That’s a Fokker Friendship,’ my father said as the little plane taxied down the runway and rose up into the sky. ‘They last forever, just about.’

  Like Miri and me. We’ve lasted. Over the years I’ve told her most of this story, the one I’m telling now, the story of Frankie, the boy I loved when I was sixteen.

  *

  Miri’s glider arrived in a big flat box, in pieces which you assembled yourself. I’ve never been much good at that sort of thing, and my neighbour Jim Berry saw me struggling on the veranda and came over to give me a hand. ‘There!’ he said, when we’d finally got the whole thing together, giving it a small shove with his foot, setting it gently rocking. ‘There you go!’

  Something about the way he stood there, smiling, rubbing the palms of his big hands down the sides of his jeans, made me think of Frankie. Frankie would have been the kind of man who’d be good at this: good at fitting stuff together and making it go right, making it part of what he called the ‘lovely, lovely world’.

  The lovely, lovely world. Out here, it’s all around me: across the road a group of kids in baggy shorts and big tee-shirts are kicking a ball around the oval; dust and the last smoky sunlight blurs their outlines so they seem soft and cloudy as young ghosts. Dusk is falling, and it’s exactly the way Frankie described it to me back at St Finbar’s. If I let my mind drift easily, lazily, without actually trying to bring him back, sometimes I’ll hear his voice as clearly as I hear those young boys over there. It happens now. ‘And the dusk,’ he’s saying, ‘the dusk, back where I come from, it’s like—it’s like—flour—’ He gives a little whoop of pleasure because he’s found the word. ‘Flour,’ he repeats delightedly, ‘you know, when someone’s mum’s making a cake and she’s sifting flour and it falls down over all the stuff in the bowl—that’s our dusk in Currawong.’

  I look out across my garden. Yes, there’s his dusk, falling gently like sooty flour from some enormous sieve—and up there in the sky I can even make out those little green stars he talked about, the colour of new apple leaves, just beginning to show—

  *

  Frankie lived
in this town when he was a boy, in Lisson Street, Currawong, number three. The first time I came looking for him was on the annual leave of my very first posting. I was twenty-four. It was a full eight years since I’d last seen him. I could have come sooner, why didn’t I? I could have come when I finished at St Finbar’s, or even on one of those summer vacations when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—I know my parents would have given me the money for the fare. I thought of him every day, and yet I waited years.

  ‘Why?’ Miri should have asked me when I told her this.

  ‘Why didn’t you go sooner? Why did you wait so long?’

  She didn’t ask because I think she knew the answer. I waited so long because I was afraid. You see, as long as I didn’t go, I could think that Frankie was safely there, back with his family in Currawong, perhaps even married to Manda Sutton or some other local girl.

  I’ve always been a fearful kind of person: a sheltered child, a bookish child, a kid who was ‘good at school’. I think that’s why my father used to take me with him on his doctor’s rounds some nights, to get me out into the world, to get me to see things. Once I read that fear is a kind of wickedness and I believe that’s true. You may not even recognise the fear. That doesn’t matter, it takes hold of you just the same, wraps itself round you like a python, paralyses—you’re no good to anyone. And it never ends—one fear passes, and then another comes behind it, like the waves of the sea. On the bus to Currawong that first time I started to feel afraid, not that Frankie wouldn’t be there, which I think I knew already, but that he would be—and I’d knock on his door and he’d open it, and he wouldn’t remember me. There’d be a couple of little kids clinging to his legs, and a woman’s voice would call out from another room, Who is it, love? and he wouldn’t know what to reply because he wouldn’t recognise this stranger at his door.

  Of course, he wasn’t there. The Maguires, his family, had left the town by then. Their old house was a big, ramshackle weatherboard; its paint peeling, the front steps half fallen in, weeds growing through. I could see at a glance that no one had lived in it for years. ‘No forwarding address,’ the woman at the post office told me; the whole family had left years ago, she hadn’t known them, it was before her time. Manda Sutton had gone too; she was Manda Cutler now, married with two children, living in another small town. I didn’t bother to ask for her address; I knew she wouldn’t know where he was. I went back to Lisson Street and knocked on the neighbour’s door. He was the only neighbour; the street was short, the mere beginning of a street—beyond those two houses it petered out into vacant lots and then the straw-coloured paddocks began. It was summer and the air above them seemed to glitter.

  ‘Moved off to the city, the whole lot of them,’ said the old man who opened the door. He wasn’t sure which city. His name was Ted Stormer and he took me inside and sat me down on his sofa and brought me a glass of orange cordial with a big chunk of ice in it. He hadn’t known the Maguires all that well, he told me, he’d only been in this house a few months when they’d moved. August it was, he said. August 1950.

  1950 was the year Frankie had been at St Finbar’s with me. He’d vanished in the very middle of it, on a freezing night towards the end of June. People said he’d run away, and that after a bit he’d go home, though he’d told me his father would throw him out if he did. He could have gone home to say goodbye to his mum and the little kids, even if it was only for a day, before he went off again to find his way in the world. And if he had come back, then Ted Stormer would have been right next door. He might have seen him. The idea of that sighting made my heart race. ‘Do you remember a boy called Frankie coming home that winter?’ I asked him. ‘A tall boy, blond hair, about sixteen—’

  Sixteen. The word stopped me in my tracks. At the very sound of it, I saw Frankie beside me, his face lit by that brilliant sickle moon. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed! he was saying. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed!

  That kind of sudden memory can stun you like a blow. Your whole head seems to open wide. It’s the vividness of it, the life—so the memory seems more real than the actual life you’ve got in the here and now, the air you’re breathing, the place you’re in. Ted Stormer’s living room wavered and receded; instead I saw the cold grass full of moonlight on the hillside at St Finbar’s, I heard Frankie’s voice saying sadly, I wish you had. I felt the warmth of him, his body close to mine.

  ‘You all right?’

  I snapped out of it, looked up. Ted Stormer was standing beside my chair, staring down at me—at my dazzled face, my hand trembling and the ice rattling in my glass. ‘You all right?’ he asked again.

  ‘It’s just the heat.’ It should have been a good excuse in Currawong but I could see he didn’t buy it. ‘I’m okay.’ I took a big gulp of orange cordial and he watched me for a few seconds before going back to his chair.

  ‘This Frankie. Good mate of yours, was he?’ His rough old voice was gentle.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He rubbed at his stubbly jaw and his bright eyes wandered towards the window, where you could see a bit of the Maguires’ yard, and a rusting old bicycle lying in the weeds. ‘He was sixteen, you said? This mate?’

  Sixteen. I waited for Frankie’s voice to come again, and the cold moony hillside, but they stayed away. I cleared my throat. ‘Yes, he was sixteen. Tall. He had blond hair. You’d have noticed him if he came there that winter.’ Everyone noticed Frankie.

  ‘No such thing as winter in this place.’ The old man leaned towards me. His big smile was full of delight. ‘But 1950—I remember that year because it wasn’t long since the wife passed away and I’d just come here and everything sort of—struck. It was very clear, every little thing hit you, know what I mean?’

  I did know. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m thinking hard, and the only boys I remember next door were the twins, Paul and Markie, they were called. Little boys—the only big kid was a girl, had an odd sort of name.’

  ‘Dymphna.’

  ‘That’s it. But no Frankie, not that I remember. I never saw any older boy. Not that winter or any time.’ He stared down at the carpet. ‘Not that I had that much to do with them, mind—just the odd word over the fence, now and again. They pretty much kept to themselves, the Maguires. They went to the church a lot though. You tried the people up there?’

  *

  ‘We went to early mass every morning,’ Frankie had told me. ‘All of us, every morning, even in winter when it was still dark, even when it was raining.’

  Back in those days there were still families who did this. I remember waking in the early mornings and hearing their footsteps going past our house, the hushed voices, the occasional soft laugh. It was ordinary life. ‘And then, when we got home again,’ Frankie went on, ‘Dad would do it all over again.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Say the whole mass again. From this little book he had, sort of like a priest. We had to kneel down and say all the responses before we could have breakfast, and we’d be so hungry—sometimes the little kids would cry. And then he’d get angry—’

  There was no way you could say that was ordinary. I thought his father sounded spooky. I remember we were walking through the cloisters when he told me this; it was shadowy in there but you could see the sun at the end like a door full of light and I remember glancing at his face to see how he felt about these things he was telling me. I’d thought he looked puzzled, even slightly stricken, as if he was trying to work something out and it wouldn’t come, like a problem in maths where you couldn’t get the answer however many times you tried. But when we came out into the sunlight of the courtyard he smiled at me and I thought the stricken expression might simply have been in my imagination.

  *

  When I left Ted Stormer’s place that afternoon I went up to the church. The priest was only a few years older than me and he’d trained in New Zealand, so he hadn’t been at St Finbar’s, and if he guessed I was in the same profession he didn’t say anything. His na
me was Edwin Dunbar and, like the lady at the post office, it turned out the Maguires were before his time too. He gave me some names of older people in his congregation and a few younger ones who might have been at school with Frankie and I wandered round town, asking here and there. Ted Stormer had been right: the Maguires, as a family, had kept pretty much to themselves. No one seemed to have been close to them; no one knew where they’d gone. No forwarding address had been left at the school or the church or the council office. I tracked down a couple of Frankie’s old schoolmates and they remembered him all right, though they’d never heard from him after he left for St Finbar’s. ‘Frankie Maguire? Yeah!!! What’s he up to these days, then? Bet he didn’t stay long in that place! Drop us a line if you find him, eh?’

  *

  Forty years after that first visit I came back here to Currawong, this time to stay. A retirement posting, they called it. Miri shook her head when I told her. ‘Oh, Tom! Why do you want to bury yourself in that hole, miles from anywhere? No, don’t tell me, I know. It’s where he lived! Now what earthly good is it going to do you to go and live where he used to live? When he was a child. Face it, Tom, he’s gone from there, he’s gone years and years ago. And you know it!’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘when people get older, they come back to see the place where they grew up.’

  ‘You don’t believe that. Not about Frankie.’

  I said nothing and she stamped her foot, like she used to do when we were kids and argued. Despite the arthritis in her hip, she stamped that foot hard. ‘Oh, get a life, Tom!’

  Get a life! It’s something her grandchildren say, I think.

  ‘I’ve got one,’ I said.

  She put her hands on her hips, firmly. She glared at me.

  ‘Tom Rowland! I give up on you!’

  She hasn’t though. She wouldn’t. Not yet.

  *

  Outside my front fence in Currawong, a can rattles down the street, there are shouts and running feet, the boys from the oval are going home. As they pass beneath the streetlight I see they’re about the same age Frankie and I were at St Finbar’s, and I think how the life we lived in the seminary would be quite unimaginable to them. That there could be a place where you always felt hungry and where you might get into trouble for giving a piece of bread to another hungry child! For singing a lullabye! A place where it was wrong even to glance at a girl in the street, wrong to look around you at the things of the lovely world. ‘Guard your eyes!’ Etta’s thin voice would call out as we walked in our bleak little crocodile through the streets of Shoreham. ‘Guard your eyes!’