My Lovely Frankie Read online

  Hay was too terrified to notice, he was blind to everything except the words on the page. Even when he looked up and smiled that dreadful frightened smile I’m sure he didn’t really see us there. The silence in the refectory was so complete that you could actually hear him breathing, in and out and in and out, a hoarse ragged sound which seemed too old for him. It was then I glanced across at Etta.

  He’d paused in his eating to take a sip of water from his glass. One sip, that was all. When he put the glass down on the table he picked up his napkin and wiped his lips, and then his gaze went straight to Frankie. I can’t describe the expression on his face except to say that it reminded me of an empty thing filling, and that it terrified me because I saw I’d been right about him all along. John Rushall had been right, when he’d said, ‘He gets these downs on people and then he wants to get rid of them, see?’ And the kids had been right who whispered that Etta had a thousand eyes. He had set a last trap to get Frankie into trouble, and as the trap revealed itself to me I was both amazed and sickened to see how well Etta knew Frankie. From his watching, his attention, he knew Frankie as well as I did, as well as a mother might know her favourite child. He knew Frankie’s sympathy and his protectiveness of the younger boys, he knew his impulsiveness, his fearlessness. He knew the Rector’s temper and he would have noted Hay’s stammer, and he put all these together and set up Hay Jarrell to read. He knew what would happen.

  At the lectern, Hay was beginning again. ‘St, St Francis, f-feeling great com-compass-com—’

  Frankie edged further forward on his seat. ‘Compassion,’ he mouthed. In the silence the word seemed almost audible.

  I knew the story of The Wolf of Gubbio. It had been a favourite of one of our teachers at primary school; she’d read it to us so many times that I knew bits off by heart. What struck me now was the gentleness of the story, where the wolf is forgiven and fed every day by the villagers until he dies of a peaceful old age—and how it seemed to belong to a world that was kindlier than ours. Up at the high table the Rector was eating, his thick fingers lifting the loaded forkfuls to his shiny lips, occasionally glancing contemptuously at Hay. Beside him Old Blinky seemed to have fallen into a doze, his head resting on one hand. These days I wonder about Old Blinky’s dozes. He wasn’t really old—in that photograph Frankie had found in the St Finbar’s journal he looked roughly the same age as the Rector, who was only in his forties when he was Head at St Finbar’s. I wonder now whether Blinky’s dozes were really a form of hiding in tedious or difficult situations, pretending he wasn’t there. Father Stuckey’s broad face was flushed, he’d crumpled his table napkin into a round shape like a ball and was rubbing it against the front of his cassock. Father James wore his fine distant stare—perhaps he was thinking of my mother, or reflecting on those mysterious words of Aquinas: The good is what all things desire.

  And Hay stumbled on, sentence after agonising sentence. The students had been silent at first, embarrassed for him, even ashamed. Now after what seemed like an eternity of that stumbling voice, those tense silences when you thought he would never go on and the whole thing would never end, that we’d all be trapped in it forever like a spell, some of them began to jeer at him. The jeering was soft at first, an oddly delicate hissing, then a slow tapping of spoons began upon the tables, and someone called out, ‘Hey! Hey! Hay!’

  ‘Silence!’ the Rector shouted. Father Stuckey stood up as if he was going to protest, then as suddenly sat down again, the balled napkin dropping from his hand. Hay clutched at his spiky hair.

  There was the sudden raucous scrape of a chair across the stone floor. Frankie was on his feet and striding towards the high table. The table stood on a low dais and when he reached the edge he sprang up on it so that he stood only a few inches from the teachers’ chairs. The Rector rose from his place. ‘You!’ he said slowly, ponderously. ‘You dare—’

  Frankie cut him off. I remember his voice as rather mild. ‘Let him go,’ he said, waving a hand towards the trembling Hay. ‘Let him go back to his seat, please. I’ll do the reading.’

  ‘You will do nothing!’ shouted the Rector, the vein jerking at his temple. ‘You will go back to your seat, and you will come to my study and see me after prayers!’ He pointed at Hay. ‘And that boy will continue with the reading.’

  ‘No,’ said Frankie, and a ripple of pure astonishment ran round the tables.

  The Rector’s heavy lips fell open in a wet red square. ‘You defy me?’

  For a moment Frankie said nothing. He stood with his head held slightly to one side, his eyes thoughtful, as if he was searching for the right words. ‘It’s wrong what you’re doing,’ he said. His gaze took in the pitiful figure of Hay at the lectern, swept back to the Rector. ‘It’s—’ He paused, thoughtful again, looking for a second word.

  ‘Frankie,’ Father James whispered. ‘Frankie—’

  The Rector turned on him. ‘And you shut up!’ he bawled.

  There was a great gasp from all the tables.

  ‘It’s bad,’ said Frankie, and this second simple word was wonderfully true.

  The Rector’s chest swelled out above the sash that girdled his soutane, one great hand slammed down on the table, the other pointed straight at Frankie. ‘You!’ he shouted. ‘You—’ and then an odd thing happened: his thick lips moved and no words came, only a muted rumble like thunder from a distant storm. There was an uncanny resemblance to Hay’s stammer. ‘Y-y—’ The red of his face was deepening, turning the colour of the wine in his glass. ‘Y-you!’ He found his voice. ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Go and wait outside my study; you may cool your heels there in the corridor until I come. I’ll see you after p-p-p—’ The awful echo of Hay’s stammer returned and his eyes started from his head in fury. ‘P-p-p—’

  Old Blinky gently touched his arm. ‘After prayers,’ he whispered. ‘After prayers, Rufus.’

  The Rector swallowed. ‘After prayers,’ he echoed like a child.

  Frankie left the room. Etta watched him.

  ‘Cooley!’ the Rector screamed.

  Even at this moment, when he must have felt triumphant, Etta still flinched at the sound of his real name. He stood up.

  ‘Cooley, you go and watch him, he’s a tricky one, he’s cunning. You make sure he stays where he’s told till I come.’

  Swiftly, Etta followed.

  ‘Eat!’ the Rector bellowed at the rest of us. ‘Eat!’

  Obediently we picked up our forks.

  ‘And you get back to your place. We’ve had enough of you.’ He jabbed a finger at Hay and sat down in his chair. He looked old and tired and I saw Old Blinky lean forward and pat his hand, and I thought of that photograph Frankie had found, where the two of them were boys and there was a white butterfly perched on the back of the future Rector’s hand. It didn’t make me hate him less, and I saw how Bri Tobin might be right when he talked about getting a black hole inside you and wanting to hurt people and not even knowing you did.

  Over at the lectern poor Hay couldn’t seem to move. He stood there, shaking all over, until Father Stuckey went across and took the book from his hand and led him back to his place at the juniors’ table. And when Hay was settled there, Father Stuckey walked over to the lectern, opened the book and began to read the story to us, right from the beginning.

  ‘At the time when St Francis was living in the city of Gubbio, a large wolf appeared in the neighbourhood, so terrible and so fierce that he not only devoured other animals, but made a prey of men also … ’

  19.

  It was hours before Frankie returned from his summons that night. I’d hurried back, afraid that I’d find his door wide open, Etta and the prefects in there clearing out the room, Frankie expelled already, gone. I pictured a big hand on his shoulder, a push into a car, a swift ride down to the bus stop at Shoreham, another push into the street. Expulsions happened quickly. You never saw them, and the silence, the secrecy, meant you could imagine anything.

  Whe
n I reached our corridor, Frankie’s door was closed.

  There was no sound from inside.

  As I stood there, someone hissed my name. ‘Tom!’

  Bri Tobin and a group of other boys had gathered at the top of the stairs. ‘Is he there?’ whispered Bri.

  I opened the door and switched on the light. The room was empty and as I looked round, it struck me what a painfully narrow place it was to keep a human being, especially one like Frankie. His dressing gown lay on the bed and I guessed it wouldn’t be there if he’d been chucked out and his things all cleared away. Relief swept through me like a tide.

  ‘Not there?’ asked Bri.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Still with the Rector then.’ He frowned.

  ‘It’s hours,’ said Joey Gertler. ‘I wouldn’t want to be him.’

  ‘I would,’ said Bri, his eyes bright. ‘Because he’s got guts.’

  ‘He’ll get chucked out for sure,’ said Dan Yelty.

  ‘So?’

  There was a scuffling sound above us. A group of the small kids were hanging over the banister on the landing outside their dorm. Hay was amongst them, his freckles brilliant against the whiteness of his skin. His spiky hair seemed to quiver. The poor kid probably thought that if Frankie got chucked out it would be his fault. ‘Will he?’ he asked us.

  ‘No one’s going to chuck old Frankie out,’ Bri Tobin answered him. ‘Not unless he wants to go.’

  ‘But will he? Will he go?’

  ‘That’s up to him,’ Bri said gently, and Hay whispered, ‘I don’t want him to go,’ and a ripple of agreement passed through the small kids, a little lament for what life might be without Frankie. They drifted away into their dormitory and for a few minutes we older ones stood round, talking about Frankie and what might be happening in the Rector’s study, then we too drifted back to our rooms. I lay on my bed and waited. Why was Frankie so long with the Rector? I pictured his dressing gown crumpled on the bed—its presence there had suggested the room hadn’t been cleared, but what if some prefect, hurrying from the room, had simply dropped it, unnoticed? I closed my eyes and now I thought the dressing gown had exactly that look about it: a dropped look, half on the blanket, the other half trailing to the floor. I tried to remember anything else which might suggest the room hadn’t been cleared—notebooks on the desk, a piece of clothing on the back of the chair, but I couldn’t, the moment I’d spotted the dressing gown I’d closed the door.

  I went to his room, switched on the light and looked round. The desk was bare except for a couple of the rough notebooks he’d used for Bella’s love letters. I opened the wardrobe and all his things were still inside, shirts and trousers, the red sweater, an old raincoat I’d never seen before. His underclothes were tumbled in the drawer, his shoes on the floor, an old brown suitcase up on the shelf. As I closed the wardrobe I spotted a piece of paper beneath the chair where he hung his cassock. It was one of the love letters. I picked it up and studied the simple message which seemed to say more than its few plain words, to express the longing which sent him up to the hillside to stare down at the playground of St Brigid’s, over and over again. I traced the loops and curves of the word ‘love’ and wondered what it would be like if the name written there was mine instead of hers. Though I now knew I loved him, I still couldn’t imagine how it would be if he loved me instead of Bella. I sensed that whatever happened might come in the same rush of overwhelming joy and desire that his kiss had brought me last night. Beyond that I floundered, unable to see. I didn’t know things—back at my old school I often had the feeling that the other boys knew stuff I didn’t, had explored a whole continent when my own dreamy ship had barely touched the shore.

  I folded the love letter into the pocket of my cassock.

  His own pockets would be full of them; he carried them round. What if the Rector asked him to empty out his pockets, like the teachers at my old school used to ask the army camp kids whenever anything valuable went missing? I turned out the light and sat down on the bed. I gathered up the dressing gown and buried my face in it, the folds smelled of the soap they gave us for the shower and something simple and indefinable which made me want to cry. I don’t know how long I sat there—once a child whimpered upstairs, once a door opened and closed further down the corridor, perhaps Tim Vesey returning from his lookout window on the landing or someone else coming late to bed. I slipped into a sort of daydream of Frankie living with my parents—it was possible now that this dream might become real. If the Rector threw him out, if his own parents wouldn’t have him back, then he could come to us; my parents would have him, I knew. I thought of that room down the hall from mine, how it looked out into the branches of the big apple tree and in summer the air was shadowy and green.

  The light snapped on. I looked up and there was Frankie—no one with him, no teacher, no Etta, no posse of prefects come to watch him while he gathered up his things. Just Frankie. ‘What’re you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I came to look for you, to see if you’d come back. To see if your things were still here.’

  He nodded. At first glance he looked okay, but when I looked longer I saw that his face seemed slacker, as if the bones had lost their substance and sunk in upon themselves. There was a redness round his eyes. I jumped up from the bed so he could lie down. He didn’t want to. ‘No, no, you stay there. I’m all right.’ He went over to the desk, turned the chair round and sat down on it, his long legs thrust out from his cassock, his boots flexed hard against the floor. He was shaking; the stuff of his trousers was trembling.

  ‘What happened? Are they going to—’ I couldn’t finish, it didn’t matter, he knew what I meant.

  ‘Last chance,’ he muttered. ‘He gave me one last chance.’

  ‘He did?’ I could hardly believe it. ‘That—that’s good then, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We all thought he’d chuck you out.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t. Punishments—the usual sort of stuff: banned from film nights and the bush picnic, essays to write.’ He dug the heels of his boots hard against the floor. ‘Only this time they’re locking me up.’

  ‘Locking you up?’ I pictured a dark freezing cellar, damp running down stone walls, and the idea of it must have shown in my face because he smiled faintly and said, ‘Oh, not in chains, nothing like that.’ The heels dug into the floor again. ‘Just—I’m not allowed past the courtyard, except for “supervised activities”. No more wandering, no more sneaking up the hill to see if Bella’s there, no more watching the sun come up. The lovely world’s strictly out of bounds.’

  ‘Ah. Did he know about you going up the hill?’

  ‘He seemed to. I reckon you might have been right about Etta spying on me. When I was in with the Rector, he was listening at the door, I’m sure of it. He wasn’t there when I came out, but you know that feeling you get when someone’s been in a place the moment before? I could sort of feel him, the air was thick with him, all worked up because I didn’t get chucked out. A sort of jangly feel, like you get in your ears when a big storm’s coming. Yeah, all spikes and blades and jangles. The Rector—’ He stopped and stared down at the floor.

  ‘The Rector?’

  He lifted his head and looked right at me. ‘First, first he made me wait. You know how he said, “after evening prayers?” Well, it was longer than that, it was hours—standing in the corridor, waiting for him to come, and all the time that little bastard was watching me, sitting on this chair he’d brought from somewhere, reading his prayers. He didn’t look at me once but if I’d made the slightest move he’d have been on me like a ferret on a rat. Then the Rector came, and he sent him off, and then he yelled at me, “Get in here!” like I’m a dog, and not anyone’s pet either, just some scruffy old stray. He humbled me, Tom. I hate being humbled. I hate it. Remember the Bishop?’

  ‘The Bishop?’

  ‘When we had our interviews, before we came here.

  Remember?’

  ‘O
h, yes.’

  ‘Well, did he ask you where everyone slept, in your house?’

  ‘What? Where everyone slept?’

  ‘Yeah. He didn’t ask you, did he?’

  ‘No. Why would he ask you a thing like that?’

  ‘Because he thought people like us were all over the place, even if they went to church.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Poor people. Oh, my dad had a job all right, but we were still pretty poor— and Dad used to drink a bit. Only a little bit. He used to—’ His face took on that stricken look. ‘And Mum was a wreck, just about. The bishop would’ve known about all that, Father Nolan would have told him. To people like them, we were poor, see? All over the place, like rubbish. Sleeping in each other’s beds. Doing stuff, you know. That’s why he wanted to know where we all slept.’

  ‘He wouldn’t think that!’

  ‘Yes, he would. If you’re poor, people can think anything about you.’

  ‘Only some people,’ I pleaded. ‘Only some. Most people are good—you said that, remember? When you were telling me about missing the train, and about how you stayed with the Tooheys, and how Mrs Toohey made you that cake, this high.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘And those old men on the bench outside the post office, remember? One of them showed you how to make a box kite?’

  He rubbed at his eyes. He looked desperately tired. I got up from the bed. ‘You get some sleep. I’d better go.’ I started walking towards the door and he got up from the chair and followed me, holding out his hand. I didn’t know what he wanted, for a dizzying fraction of a second I thought he wanted me, then I noticed he was pointing at my chest and I looked down and saw that I still had his dressing gown, that I was clutching it to me like a kid with some precious toy. ‘Oh!’ I held it out to him. ‘Sorry, I forgot I had it. I—’