My Lovely Frankie Page 12

  17.

  He was right, you had to have something. Except it didn’t seem fair that the mere thought of Bella could mean so much to him—that without knowing or understanding him in the least, simply by existing, carelessly, she could comfort him. I puzzled over his promise that he ‘wasn’t going to do anything’. I knew he meant it; I also knew he wasn’t the kind of person who’d be content with simply thinking and dreaming. He wasn’t like me—perhaps that was why I liked him so much, the difference held a kind of glamour. I remembered how on his way to St Finbar’s, missing the train in that small country town, he’d so quickly become part of the stationmaster’s family, a part of the town. He’d got to know the shopkeepers and their families and become friendly with the old men who sat on the bench outside the post office every day—one of them had taught him how to make a box kite. He always needed to be part of the world; if he fell in love, how could he ever be content with love letters that stayed in his pocket and never went anywhere?

  So I wasn’t a bit surprised when after a few minutes I heard him go out.

  I waited a little while and then followed him. As I came out the door he was already on the far side of the courtyard and I could tell from the direction that he was heading for the hillside. By the time I reached the paddock he was already out of sight. It seems odd now to think how I never once thought of Etta as I hurried after Frankie, never thought of him following us, or hiding, watching, in the trees. I think this sudden forgetfulness, which was like a kind of freedom, had something to do with the strangeness of that night: the dream of St Thomas sitting on my bed, which had seemed so completely real, the eerie noise of scissors on paper that I’d heard from Frankie’s room, the little love letters, the strange exalted way in which Frankie had said, ‘I’ve got Bella now.’ Then halfway up the hill the moon slid from behind a cloud, a huge bright sickle like a sword hanging in the sky, and if Etta had so much as crossed my mind I think I’d have dismissed him as nothing more than an overzealous prefect who simply wanted to bring Frankie into line. But I didn’t think of him at all, though I know now that he was watching us that night. Of course he was. He saw everything.

  When I caught up with Frankie at the top of the hill he looked pleased to see me, as if he wanted company. I think that glimpse of Hay with his parents had unsettled him deeply, made him needy in some way he hardly recognised. It may even have been the reason he wrote those love letters he could never send. And there was nothing for him up there on the hill; the garden and the school were all in darkness, the moon on the long windows gave them a dull silvery gleam, like two rows of big metal trays washed and stood on end to dry.

  It was windy and bitterly cold. As we stood there a light came on in the upper storey of St Brigid’s. The window was uncurtained and the room inside it, plain as ours, lit so brilliantly that each item of furniture showed clearly: the big desk with its four straight-backed wooden chairs, the skinny grey cupboard, the bookshelf along one wall. Beside me I heard Frankie draw in his breath and I knew he was hoping for the miracle to occur and Bella to walk into that room. She didn’t, of course; it was an elderly woman with close-cropped hair who stood in the doorway, looking round the room. She wore a dark-green dressing gown and her movements were so slow and bewildered that I guessed she’d been unable to sleep, that she’d been lying in bed for a long time, awake and thinking. She crossed the room to the shelves and took down a book, riffled for a moment through the pages, then put it back on the shelf and left the room. The light went out. There was something so painfully dreary about this little scene—the starkness of the room, the elderly woman, the very antithesis of Bella with her springy black curls and brilliant smile, that you felt the very heart go out of you.

  ‘It’s a kind of blasphemy,’ said Frankie suddenly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Formation.’

  Formation was the name given to our education, our training to be priests. It was such a hard, ungiving word: it always made me think of the shiny instruments in my father’s surgery.

  ‘God made us, didn’t he?’ demanded Frankie angrily. ‘He formed us, so St Finbar’s can’t re-form us, can they? They can’t go and make us different from what God did!’ He kicked at a stone and a kind of chime rang out, thin and metallic in the freezing air, and that too sounded so desolate that something inside you seemed to clench itself protectively, your heart perhaps, even your very life. With an abrupt movement Frankie swung round and pointed down the hill towards the great building of the seminary huddled like some huge frozen animal at the bottom of the hill. ‘They might as well cut our balls off!’ he cried. ‘They might as well!’ His voice was so clear that I half expected lights to spring up in the windows of the school and seminary. His shoulders were shaking. I reached a hand towards him and he backed away, straightening his whole body, shaking his head. ‘No, I’m all right, I’m all right. I’m okay.’ He turned back and stared down at St Brigid’s. ‘It’s all dreams anyway, me and Bella. Being in love with her. You can’t keep on being in love with a girl if there’s nothing you can do. I don’t even know why I came up here.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and dragged out fistfuls of the love letters, ripping them, scrunching them, tossing them away from him. The wind caught and blew them onto bushes, sent them scuttling over the stones and grass and up against the wall. One flew into the gap, I caught it just before it sailed down onto the road. They had his name on them—quickly, I began to gather up the others, and after a few moments Frankie stooped and began to help. His long fingers moved quickly, so close to mine it seemed they would touch, yet somehow they never did. The words on the letters kept jumping up at me, I love you, I love you, sharp in the light from that sickle moon. There couldn’t have been more than thirty, but the words seemed to strike at me a hundred, a thousand times.

  When my father was dying I used to read to him. My mother had gone years before. He kept on loving her. ‘Catullus,’ he’d say to me, smiling, and I’d take the worn volume down from the shelves and read his favourite poem:

  Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred

  And as I read I’d see those little white notes of Frankie’s lying on the grass of that frozen hillside and the words leaping up at me and those long brown fingers so close to mine.

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred,

  Then yet another thousand, then a hundred...

  When all the love letters were gathered up, we turned back towards the seminary. Halfway down the hill Frankie stopped and I stopped and he asked me, ‘Tom, have you ever had a girl?’ I knew he didn’t mean taking a girl out, going to the pictures, walking home with her and giving her a kiss at the door—he meant sex like he’d had with Manda Sutton.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ he said sadly, ‘I wish you had.’ Those brilliant eyes searched my face. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  He sighed. ‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.’

  ‘What?’ I felt myself blushing again and hoped it was too dark for him to notice.

  ‘It’s just something my dad used to say, when my sisters turned sixteen, on their birthdays, he used to bawl out, “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed!” And then he’d give them this great whacking big kiss—mwaaa! They hated it. My biggest sister, Polly, she ran off when I was little; I don’t know what happened to her, we never heard or anything. I can hardly remember her but I hope she gets lots of kisses wherever she is.’ He shook his head. ‘Sixteen. We’ll be like that forever now.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We’ll be sweet sixteen for always, see? No more kisses. Not proper kisses, anyway—just those little old ladies who come up after mass and say, “Thank you, Father,” and then they’ll stand on tippy-toe and make their mouths like this—’ he pleated his lips into a tiny shape, ‘and give us this tiny little peck, li
ke a birdie at a seed bell.’

  ‘You could always leave.’ The words sprang out of me, I could hardly believe I was saying them. I didn’t want him to leave, of course I didn’t! I’d worried for months that Etta would get him chucked out, sent away. Yet I did say them, I had to, there was this kind of welling in his voice, like the little kids upstairs when they were trying not to cry.

  The effect on him was startling. ‘Oh, no!’ he whispered. ‘Oh, no!’ He stopped dead, his hands fell to his sides, the honest moon showed the shock on his face. ‘Leave? I’d never leave! I promised!’ And he glanced up at the sky.

  I’d always known that his belief in heavenly beings was different to mine; now I heard in that astonished voice how close they were to him, like real people in the house next door. Like family. ‘I’d never leave!’ he repeated, and now there was a kind of rapture on his face that for a shocking moment reminded me of Etta standing by the tap in the teachers’ garden, his face uplifted—

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘Sorry. I just—I don’t know why I said it. I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ He made a little gesture with his hand. ‘That’s just how it is with me,’ he said, and then, quite unexpectedly, he smiled. ‘Anyway, if I left I’d have no place to go. Dad’d kill me if I went back there. Homeless, I’d be.’

  ‘You could stay at my place. My parents wouldn’t mind. They like having people—’ The idea of it surged up in me: Frankie living in my house, in the room down the hall from mine, I could see him in the holidays, perhaps I would also leave, perhaps I should, because I didn’t understand the love of God. He’d taken his hand from my head, I felt angry so much of the time…

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ Frankie was saying. ‘But thanks. Thanks, Tom. But see, I’ve got to stay. That promise was serious. Really.’

  He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. It was only friendship, perhaps a bit of gratitude, I knew that, just as I knew with that kiss that I loved him quite differently. Properly, I would say. Like my father loved my mother, or Denny loved Joseph. Perhaps I’d always known.

  ‘You knew and you didn’t know,’ said Miri when I told her.

  She poked a finger in my chest. ‘You knew in there.’

  ‘The heart’s on the left side,’ I told her.

  ‘And the heart knows.’

  Whatever the heart knows, dear Miri, I felt no shock at the realisation of my love, simply an immense joy, so intense that I can’t remember—no, I have no memory of it at all—the two of us walking across the paddock and through the gardens and the cloister and in through the door and up the stairs to our separate rooms. When I got into bed I remember sliding down beneath the blanket and the knowledge that I loved Frankie got in beside me like a person made of dreams and I took him in my arms.

  ‘Goodnight, Tom.’ The real Frankie’s voice came from behind the wall, unselfconscious, the same as ever. I knew he wasn’t like me. I knew it was girls he liked and he could never love me in that way. He’d have forgotten all about that kiss before we even reached the courtyard—and yet I was happy that night, happier than I’d ever been. I put a finger to my lips and I swear I could feel the warmth from his lips still trembling on my own. I pressed gently with my fingertip to seal it in.

  18.

  I was still in a daze at dinnertime the next evening. The whole day—chapel and classes and meals and sport—all of it had passed in a sort of fog. Only the brief glimpses of Frankie were clear: in front of me at chapel, two tables across at breakfast, his brown hand reaching for the milk jug, a flash of red sweater on the oval at Father Stuckey’s training session. At lunchtime I’d looked up and our eyes had met across the tables and he’d smiled at me—the same smile as always. I’ve often wondered if he guessed about me; he was less innocent than I was, and although he came from a small town, he knew more about people and the world. I like to think he knew a gay boy when he saw one, even if the boy himself didn’t know, and that—like my parents—it didn’t matter to him; he liked you just the same, you were simply part of the lovely, lovely world. William Blake once wrote that everything that lives is holy and I think Frankie was a lot like him.

  That evening in the refectory I underestimated Etta. Frankie’s kiss and the realisation of my own nature had given me a kind of strength. ‘It’s being able to love another person, that’s the most important thing,’ my father had said, and I was able to love and I felt it made me a part of the world. I looked across at Etta standing at the head of the seniors’ table; in the harsh light he looked weak and scrawny, the domed head too big for the spindly body, his pink baby’s scalp shining through the close-shorn hair. I could hardly believe I’d been so afraid that this boy with his Book of Little Things had the power to separate me from Frankie.

  So I had no suspicion of what was coming as the staff took their places at the high table. There was a conference in the city that evening so there were only three of them besides the Rector: Old Blinky, Father Stuckey and Father James. Grace was said: ‘Bless, Lord, Your gifts in our use and ourselves in Your service, through Jesus Christ our Lord,’ the Rector gabbled, so fast it all sounded like one word.

  Amen. We all sat down except for Etta, who kept on standing. He tapped his glass again and picked up a single sheet of paper from the table—the list of readers. Except on feast days, talking at meals was forbidden, and selected students read from various devotional works. It was from one of these that I’d learned of the nun who’d broken her leg one night and, out of respect for the Great Silence, hadn’t called for help till morning. For the last week our readings had been from The Little Flowers of St Francis. Etta looked down at his list and called out the name of the evening’s reader. It was Hayden Jarrell.

  Readings by the younger students were rare but not unknown; it had been one of the young ones, Johnny Lowry, who’d read the story of the stoical nun. Hay got to his feet, his small face flaming. ‘M-me?’ he stammered. Etta said nothing.

  ‘Me?’ asked Hay again. The Rector had been pouring a glass of wine, now he looked up and bellowed, ‘Yes, boy, it’s you! Now get a move on, we haven’t got all night!’

  His face still scarlet, Hay squeezed out along the narrow space between his table and the wall. His cassock was a little too long for him—his mother would have bought it a size too big, in the hope that he’d grow into it.

  *

  He did grow into it. I met him a few years back at the opening of a new college in the city, a tall willowy man in a grey suit that even I could see was expensive, still with that sandy hair which at St Finbar’s had seemed to mirror all his terrors with its electric spikiness. Now it lay calm and smooth, streaked with a little grey. There was no trace of the stammer. We talked about Frankie, of course. ‘You know, I’d never have thought he’d leave,’ said Hay. ‘He seemed like a stayer to me. And they didn’t kick him out, even when he told the Rector off that time—’ His cheeks coloured, remembering that night in the refectory. ‘And that was my fault.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. He’d have told the Rector off some day; you could see it coming. Always.’

  Hay smiled. ‘I’d take a guess it was the girls then. The reason for his leaving, I mean. You can tell when they like the girls. There’s a kind of—glow to them. Frankie had it, and my Uncle Colly was just the same. I bet wherever Frankie is now, there’ll be a girl. And she’ll be beautiful.’

  I was grateful to him for saying that. I was grateful whenever I met someone who believed Frankie was somewhere in the world.

  *

  That night in the refectory, as Hay scurried past the high table, the hem of his long cassock caught beneath his heel and he stumbled slightly. The Rector leaned forward and hissed at him. ‘Pick up your feet, boy!’

  Hoisting the hem well clear of his skinny ankles, Hay almost ran those last few steps to the lectern. He was so small his chin barely grazed the edge of its shelf and his fingers trembled as he grasped the silk ribbon that marked the place where last night’
s reader had finished. For a moment he simply stood there, silent, his small shoulders sagging in a dejected line—then the ribbon slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He stooped and picked it up, then stood with it in his hand, staring blankly at the book. It was obvious he’d lost the place. Father Stuckey got up from his chair and walked round the edge of the table towards the lectern, where he turned a few pages and marked the place with the ribbon for Hay. ‘The Wolf of Gubbio,’ he whispered, patting him on the shoulder. Then he went back to the high table and sat down and the Rector looked up from his soup bowl and scowled at him.

  ‘Of,’ began Hay in his squeaky little kid’s voice. ‘—of the most ho-ho-holy m-m-miracle of St Francis in t-t—’

  On an ordinary day his stammer was barely noticeable. That evening of course wasn’t ordinary: chosen unexpectedly, roared at by the Rector, forced to stand before us all and read, he could hardly form two words in succession. He would get a word and then stumble on the next, get a little rush of two or three, perhaps a whole sentence, and then stop altogether, his throat working—like a baby just learning to walk, you half expected him to fall down. Now and again he’d glance up from the book and look out at us and then he’d smile, and the smile was so pitiful that it gave you a shamed feeling, as if you were somehow to blame. We were having steamed pudding for dessert that night, and in the kitchen the helpers were already ladling it into the bowls and the smell of golden syrup seemed to hover over us in a thick sweet cloying smog. I’ve never been able to touch the stuff since. Hardly any of us were eating. The little kids sat frozen, their eyes fixed on Hay. At the seniors’ table, John Rushall had laid his knife and fork across his plate and sat bolt upright, staring at the ceiling. Next to me Tim Vesey lifted a forkful of potato and gravy to his mouth and then put it down again. Only Etta seemed to be eating normally, knife and fork held neatly in those little paws. I looked across at Frankie’s table and saw that he’d pushed his plate away and turned his chair round to face the lectern, his lips, his whole face, mouthing in silent encouragement, ‘It’s all right, you can do it, come on, Hay!’