My Lovely Frankie Read online

  He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, wearing a purple dressing gown trimmed with gold braid. At first I thought something terrible had happened to his hands, they were blood red, the colour of fresh raw meat—then I realised he was wearing rubber gloves, the kind my mother used for cleaning. There was a sheet of newspaper on his lap, and another spread on the floor in front of him, a soft yellow cloth lay on it, and a tin of polish and a boot. The second boot was in his hands. He was cleaning it with a small black brush, carefully removing the sticky grey sand which caked its sole and heel. His cleaning would be meticulous, there wouldn’t be a trace of that grey stuff left when he’d finished; the boot already sitting on the newspaper shone like new. His cassock hung on the knob of the wardrobe door, wiped clean, the small rent mended, a new button sewn on. He would have such things, I thought contemptuously, brushes and polish, soft cloth, needle and thread and new buttons; his mother would have packed them for him because he had to look perfect, all the time.

  Absorbed in his task, he had no idea that I was watching him. He appeared oddly content, composed, like a person who has been frightened but now has a happy idea. ‘Once every grain of this sand is removed,’ he might have been thinking, ‘then everything is going to be all right for me.’ His lips were moving and somehow I knew it wasn’t a prayer he was saying, like you might expect from the head prefect of St Finbar’s in the early hours of the morning. No, Etta was singing to himself, I could tell from the almost jaunty way he swung his head. I wondered what the song was. The whole scene: the lighted room, the night outside, Etta’s cross-legged posture, his smallness, the boots, was like a scene from the story of the shoemaker and the elves. And I thought of that other story, Rumpelstiltskin, and wondered what he’d do if I suddenly tapped on the window and called out his true name, Brian Cooley! Would he have torn himself in two?

  I don’t know, because I didn’t call his name. Instead, I hurried away. I needed my gentle sea.

  *

  It was almost light when I got down to Shoreham. I passed a milkman with his horse and cart in the first streets of the town. He was a big rangy man with a sunburned face and a mop of dark blond hair, the sort of man Frankie might be when he was middle-aged. ‘Early start, eh?’ he said, and I felt a little thrill of happiness as if the ordinary world was folding me into it again. As I passed the bus stop I thought how I could even go home. I had money—despite my protests my mother had insisted on sewing two five-pound notes into the hem of my overcoat. ‘Just in case,’ she’d said. Everything depended on what happened to Frankie: as long as he stayed, I would stay. If they expelled him then I would go too.

  I walked towards the beach along a street of small homely shops which were exactly like the ones in the side streets of the suburb where my parents lived, and in all the side streets of all the suburbs like it: a small grocery, a haberdashery with a bright display of knitting wools in the window, a milk bar where the lady who was folding back the shutters called out to me, ‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it, love? Looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day!’

  It did look like that. The wind had dropped and the sky was clear except for a flock of small white fluffy clouds floating along the horizon. When I reached the beach I took off my boots and the sand felt silky beneath my feet, a pale whitish gold in the early light. Further down it was damp and firm, the colour of rich toffee, nothing like that coarse grey stuff that had been on Etta’s boots and cassock. The thought of that stuff made me feel sick. I didn’t want to think about where it had come from, I hummed to myself to push it away. Hushabye, don’t you cry— As I reached the water’s edge the sun was beginning its rising, a round edge of rosy gold above the horizon. The little clouds turned pink and then the sea turned pink, the whole wide swell of it, right up to the small lacy waves running over my feet, so that it looked like a great rose-coloured quilt flung down upon the sand. I was flooded with joy, the very same joy I’d seen so often on Frankie’s face when he saw something beautiful in his lovely, lovely world.

  ‘Oh, look!’ I whispered, ‘look!’ and for a moment I actually thought he was there. I felt him standing right beside me, I felt his warmth and heard his long sigh of pure happiness, ‘Ah-ah.’ I turned to smile at him. He wasn’t there, the sigh was only the sound of the sea turning and folding itself on the sand.

  Across the Esplanade a clock chimed six slow strokes. Up at St Finbar’s they’d be getting up, grabbing their boots and cassocks, heading for the showers. Frankie would be back by now. I turned from the rosy sea and hurried up the sand and past the little shops and into the road that led towards St Finbar’s. It was early morning now; the gates of St Brigid’s stood open and out in the garden a group of girls in lumpy gym tunics were doing calisthenics with one of the teachers. I saw Bella with the rest of them, her thick dark hair tumbling from its ribbon again. As I passed she stood still and stared at me and then the other girls stared and the teacher swung round and for a moment I thought they might recognise me from that long-ago day when Bella had smiled at Frankie.

  But I don’t think they did recognise me. In my long overcoat I was only an ordinary, not very handsome boy walking along the road. The teacher made a swift little chopping motion with one hand and the girls’ glances swerved away from me and they went on with their exercises. As I hurried on I heard one of them laugh, and I’m sure it was Bella—it was a beautiful laugh, warm and soft as those rosy little waves down on the beach, no trace of meanness or mockery in it—simply the sound of the lovely, lovely world.

  22.

  Back at the seminary, I found Frankie still hadn’t returned. Nothing had been touched in his room, his clothes and bag were still in the wardrobe, my notes, ‘just in case’, still tucked into the pocket of his spare trousers. Only—he wasn’t in chapel that morning and his place was empty all day at mealtimes and in the classes we shared. I saw people glance at that space and a queer little ripple of fear was in the air, the ripple that spread through all of us whenever a student who’d been in his place, every day, suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Frankie didn’t come back that day, or that night, or the next day or the next night—or any night or any day. He didn’t come back at all.

  *

  For once we were told; at least we were told that Frankie hadn’t been expelled. This might have been because the police came—not right away, not that day or the next. They came a week or so after Frankie had disappeared. I suppose by that time the Rector must have contacted the Maguires and learned that he hadn’t come home. The single black police car was parked discreetly at the far end of the courtyard, near that vine-covered veranda where I’d once asked John Rushall why Etta hadn’t reported Frankie for breaking St Finbar’s rules.

  I hadn’t seen Etta since the night on the hillside. There was a story going round that he’d caught pneumonia and been taken to hospital in the city and then to his home to convalesce. The two policemen were with the Rector for less than an hour, and after that they drove away. There was no search, none of us were questioned.

  In those early days I found I wasn’t the only student who knew about Frankie’s wanderings. Almost everyone in our year had noticed how he used to slip away to the top of the hill above St Brigid’s, there were even rumours that he’d had a girlfriend down there. Hay’s parents had come for him, exactly as Frankie had said, so it was one of the other little kids who came up to me in the courtyard and asked if it was true that Frankie had run off to get married. I told him no, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and made a long sound of disappointment, ‘Awweerrr—’ I suppose they thought running off to get married was more romantic than simply running away.

  Tim Vesey knew about the ledge on the cliff; he’d even been there. ‘Spooky, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Sort of,’ I answered. I didn’t want to think of that place.

  Tim stood there quietly in front of me, shifting his weight from foot to foot and I knew he was going to ask me something else and I felt afraid of what it might be. Finally
he came out with it. ‘Do you think he could have—you know, um—’ His face coloured slightly, his eyes avoided mine, and I knew he meant could Frankie have gone to that ledge and jumped off it. ‘No,’ I said firmly, because of that one thing I was completely sure. ‘No, he never would,’ and Tim beamed at me. ‘That’s what I think! He never would! He wasn’t that kind of person! He was—he just liked everything in the world! Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He left, that’s all! And no wonder!’ Tim walked off quite jauntily.

  Most people believed this: that after the scene in the refectory and his long interview with the Rector, Frankie had simply left of his own accord. It seemed the logical explanation: the police had found nothing, his body was never washed up on the rocks or surrounding beaches in the weeks that followed. People did run away, and sometimes, like Frankie, they left no note and told no one, not even their best friends. And if they came from very pious families like Frankie’s, they might not go home for a very long time, out of fear and shame. They might find a new life up north or in one of the big cities and start their lives all over again. You could see why everyone believed he’d run off, sometimes even I was on the verge of believing it, only then I’d remember the look on his face that time he’d said, ‘I’d never leave!’—that shocked amazement, the way his eyes had seemed to become darker, that brilliant indigo swallowed by a blackness that was fierce and bright. No, I knew he wouldn’t leave.

  Only, if he hadn’t left, where was he? The question troubled me; I didn’t want to ask it, not even of myself, and as the days passed a deep confusion settled over my mind. At times I could barely remember the events of that night; at others stark images would rear up out of nowhere: the moon glinting on the tap in the teachers’ garden, grey sand on a crumpled cassock with a button torn away, a ledge of pitted rock, a great sea merging into endless sky. One afternoon, a few weeks after his disappearance, I slipped off from sport and made my way up the hill and along the wall until I came to the sandy track through blackberries and lantana. I was wild with some kind of urgency. I ran, barely registering the tough winter brambles catching at my sweater, tearing at my legs and arms. I had to see that place again. When I burst from the track onto the ledge I gasped, I’d forgotten how the sea and sky seemed to leap out at you. I dropped to my hands and knees. I hardly knew what I was doing; it seemed I was looking for something though I didn’t know what it was. It was something, some tiny sign, some indication that Frankie had been there that night. Was that it? Was that what I wanted to find? Evidence? Of what? I peered into every crack and hollow, I plunged my hands into the murky water of the small pools, raking my fingertips along the slimy rock, searching. I found nothing. Back in my room that night, for the very first time I cried and cried.

  The next afternoon I slipped away again. This time I went to the gap in the wall where Frankie used to look down into the garden of St Brigid’s. I chose the middle of the afternoon when the girls had their break because I wanted to see if Bella was there. I wanted to rid myself of an idea that would take hold of me in the middle of the night: that after all there’d been more to Frankie’s love than daydreams, that he’d had secrets he’d never told me, that he and Bella had got to know each other, that they met secretly. And if they had then he’d have contacted her, sent her a letter—the idea was all the stronger and more painful because he’d left no message for me. In the dark early hours of the morning this story would reach a kind of crescendo inside my head: perhaps by now she too had run away. Perhaps they were together.

  But when I looked down on that soft green garden with its big trees and gravel paths, Bella was there, sitting on a bench in a sunny corner, laughing with her friend. There was no change in her, nothing of that particular gravity I had come to associate with love. She looked exactly the same. I kept on going back. She could still get a letter, and I thought I’d be able to tell if she did, that then there’d be some sign. For a while there was nothing, until one afternoon—spring was coming and I remember it was a cold blowy day with bursts of sunshine and sudden brief showers, and Bella and her friend had got up from their bench and run laughing towards the shelter of the porch—and suddenly I understood that there really was nothing, nothing on Bella’s side, anyway. One day down in Shoreham she’d smiled at a boy from the seminary and he’d walked halfway across the road towards her and then a teacher had called out and they’d all moved on—it was ages ago, she probably didn’t even remember now. ‘Frankie? Who’s he?’ she’d have wondered if I’d met her in the street and asked if she’d heard from him.

  I’d been jealous of Bella receiving a letter, yet now in the middle of the night I’d think it would be better if she had. Then I’d ask myself, ‘Better than what?’

  Better than silence, better than not knowing anything, better than—and at this point a cloud would roll over my mind and hide the thoughts inside it. And then those images would come rearing up: the glinting tap, the sandy hem of Etta’s cassock, the grey ledge above the sea. I pushed them away. I was afraid of them. I kept on watching Bella, sneaking away from sport almost every day. And then one afternoon John Rushall came up to me and we sat down on the grass to talk. Like almost everyone, John believed Frankie had run away.

  ‘But he left his all stuff,’ I said. How feeble it sounded, like a child. ‘All his clothes, and his shoes, and his bag, and—’ I was about to say ‘dressing gown’ and stopped myself just in time. Before they’d cleared Frankie’s room I’d taken that dressing gown and hidden it amongst my own things. At night I slept with it pressed against my chest.

  ‘Look, Tom, sometimes it happens like that. You just—go. You’re out walking, somewhere you shouldn’t be, most likely, and all of a sudden everything wells up in you, all of it: you just go. It’s like you can’t bear to go back to your room, or anywhere in that building, even to get your things, you leave in whatever you’re standing up in—whoosh! That’s it!’

  He sounded like he might have done it, one time. And he’d come back. Somehow I knew Frankie wouldn’t. He wouldn’t come back.

  Etta had returned from his convalescence. He looked the same as ever, small, white-skinned and quiet, with his big domed head and neat little creature’s paws. Sometimes I thought I’d dreamed my meeting with him on the hillside that night, dreamed the messed-up cassock and the strange things he’d said and that terrible screaming cry, like something you trod on in the dark. Dreamed that vision of him in his room cleaning the grey sand from his boots. Perhaps I had. Sometimes I think I dreamed the whole of St Finbar’s. Only Frankie seems real.

  ‘He’ll be okay,’ John said to me that afternoon. ‘A great kid like that, wherever he goes he’ll be okay.’ I thought of Frankie that time he’d missed the train and got stranded in a country town with no money. He’d been okay then, strangers had looked after him, loved him even. John was right—wherever Frankie was, he’d be okay. There was nothing I could do. From then on I used to repeat that to myself at night: ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  John patted me on the shoulder. He said, ‘Don’t worry, eh? Just get on with it. Take my word, it might be a while, but you’ll hear from him one day.’

  I did take his word. I settled down. I learned to live with that patch of cloudiness always at the bottom of my mind. One day—it was after a night when the images had appeared again— I went back to the ledge and searched those cracks and hollows again, scraped my fingers along the bottoms of the pools. Sometimes you don’t find the thing you’re looking for the very first time. I didn’t find it the second time, either.

  23.

  I stayed on at St Finbar’s and became a priest.

  I did it for love, though not the love of God, which I still couldn’t understand. I could barely imagine that confident boy who’d believed he could feel God’s hand stretched protectively above his head—could that really have been me? It was the love of Frankie that kept me there. St Finbar’s was the place where I’d known him, and so many li
ttle things kept him close to me: a shaft of sunlight through a high window in the chapel, a flag flapping from the tower, even the portrait of the old Archbishop in the hallway, which I could never pass without hearing Frankie’s bright voice exclaiming, Look! I’m hugging the Archbishop, see! Look, I’m kissing him now! Kissing him.

  There was another reason why I stayed. I’ve kept it to myself, I’ve told no one, not even Miri, though sometimes I suspect she knows. I don’t even like to write it down here, and I won’t, not yet.

  *

  My mind back in those days resembled the strata of some ancient rockface: at the very bottom there was that cloudiness, a muddy darkness of which I was afraid, above that reared those sudden images, the glinting tap, the muddy hem, the ledge. And above them were the wide plain spaces of everyday for which I felt grateful: prayers and classes and meals in the refectory, laughing boys in the line for the handball courts, for a few weeks speculating on what Frankie might be getting up to out there in the world, and John Rushall’s cheerful voice assuring me, ‘You’ll hear from him one day.’

  I kept my hope of that. Of hearing from him. On my first posting to a small town in South Australia, my hand would tremble as I opened the lid of the dented old letterbox beside the front gate. Half a century on, it still trembles when I go to get the post. Even here, in my old house in Currawong, when the phone rings there’ll be a small flicker of anticipation that after all John Rushall might have been right and the caller will be Frankie at long last. And always there’s that little jump inside me when my computer, unknown in our time, throws up the message Receiving Mail. Frankie would be almost seventy now, like me, but why not? Isn’t it at our age that you start thinking of old friends? Old places? Home?

  I looked for him, of course. There was that first, long-delayed trip to Currawong, but every place I went I kept my eyes open; it was possible I could simply run into him, miraculously. Such things happen. ‘With God, all things are possible,’ the angel told the Virgin Mary. I’m never sure I believe in God: some days I do, some days I don’t—it was Frankie who believed every single day. And once, just once, I thought I’d found him. I’d been celebrating the wedding of a former student in the church at Myall, that same small seaside town where I’d seen those beautiful mysterious patches of indigo floating on the sea, and caught my first glimpse of St Finbar’s up there on the hill. After the reception I went down to the beach, took off my shoes and walked across the rocks to the sea-baths where my parents and I had spread our towels to sunbathe on that long-ago beautiful day. Now it was another beautiful day and those indigo patches still floated on the water and to see them gave me that feeling of richness, they made my heart turn over. Across the water St Finbar’s stood bravely on its headland, sharply edged against the cloudless sky. There was no flag flying that day, and St Finbar’s itself would have only a few more years as a seminary before the building and its grounds were sold and refurbished as a conference centre for business executives. Already on the road beneath it, the place where Frankie had first seen Bella, there were huge new houses and towering apartment blocks. Even sleepy Myall had its changes; as I made my way back along the rocks to the beach my eye was caught by the new Surf Life Saving Club built on the foreshore where the old changing sheds used to be. It was a modern building, faintly Spanish, its white stuccoed brick flushed by the setting sun. There was something eerily familiar about its facade: the arcade with its rounded arches, the parapet along the roof, that small squat turret that looked a little like a belfry. From where I was standing, halfway back along the rocks, St Finbar’s was still visible. I glanced from that old building on the cliff to the new one on the sand and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the Myall Surf Life Saving Club—its wooden decks scattered with umbrella’d tables and people in summer clothes, their laughter spilling out across the water—had been built as a small earthly replica of St Finbar’s. The sturdy little belfry was like a mocking hand raised in salute to its heavenly cousin up there on the hill.