My Lovely Frankie Read online

  I thought: Frankie.

  Over the years, whenever I’d wondered about him out there somewhere in the world, I’d been unable to imagine his occupation. Teacher? Social worker? Engineer? Nothing seemed to fit him. Ordinary occupations seemed too tame. I pictured him wandering from place to place like some itinerant monk of the Middle Ages, talking to people, gathering a little band of faithful followers. Once I asked Miri what she thought he might have become. She looked at me sideways, sadly. ‘He had charm,’ she said. ‘He had charisma. He could have been anything.’

  Anything. On the beach at Myall that sunny afternoon, I thought, ‘He could have been an architect.’

  I ran those last metres from the rocks, stumbling up the sand. Red-faced, out of breath, filled with a kind of hopeless unbelievable joy, I reached the building and circled it, searching for the plaque which would show me his name.

  It was easy enough to find, a simple pewter-coloured metal square set into the wall beside the big glass doors. My fingers met its cool surface with a tender reverence, touched the date (he would have been fifty-six that year), the names of dignitaries and benefactors—and last of all, the architect. It wasn’t Frankie. The name was Hayden Jarrell. Hay! I saw his small freckled face, the spiky, straw-coloured hair, and I heard Frankie’s voice saying clearly through our wall that last night, ‘He’ll be someone, some day.’ And he was: a whole caravan of letters followed Hay’s name. I saw Frankie in that dark little courtyard behind the St Finbar’s kitchen handing out the precious fruit to Hay and the other kids, and the oranges glowed like small globes of purest light in that murky gloom. And all at once I started to laugh, I don’t know why. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, perhaps. I laughed so hard, so hopelessly, that I sank down to my knees. Those were still the days when priests wore clerical suits and the people on the deck beneath those big striped umbrellas looked down in amazement, and a little kid called out, ‘What’s wrong with that man?’

  24.

  Miri is here. She comes to visit me at Currawong several times a year, driving her beat-up Range Rover over the dusty potholed roads. When I hear the roar of its engine in the street I go out to the gate to meet her. The Rover’s door will open and she’ll emerge, slowly—and then stand for a long moment, gazing at me, like she used to do when we were children and the holiday was over and she was going back home again, standing at the top of the Fokker Friendship’s steps, waving and waving until the hostess caught hold of her and whisked her out of sight. ‘Tom!’ she’ll say at last, and when I hear her voice I get that same feeling of richness I had from those deep blue patches floating on the sea. Indigo. She walks with a cane now, leaning heavily to one side, yet in some of her movements—the toss of her head, the wave of a hand, I can still make out the springing, dancing essence of the girl she used to be.

  She didn’t approve of me taking this retirement post so I could live in Frankie’s old home town. She calls me a romantic, she scolds me, she tells me to ‘get a life’.

  ‘Love is a fire no waters avail to quench, no floods to drown,’ I quoted once when she was scolding, and I saw her face soften at the beautiful words before she shook her head. ‘You need to get out more,’ she said. Old as I am, she still wants me to get this life, which means: she wants me to find someone. ‘Someone real’, as she puts it (though Frankie is real to me). Somebody who will love me like Chris loved her and she loved Chris, like my mother and father loved each other, or Joseph and Den.

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred

  ‘There must be some nice men in there,’ she says. By ‘in there’ she means the priesthood. Vows of celibacy don’t mean much to Miri, she thinks they’re bad for us. ‘Or you could find someone outside. You’re quite good-looking for your age.’ She waves a wrinkled hand, ‘Out there, Tom. Anywhere—’ the last syllable is like a sigh, she knows I won’t leave Currawong.

  ‘I’ll never find anyone like Frankie.’

  ‘Oh, Tom.’

  I can see what she’s thinking. It’s there in her face, like it always is. Waste: she thinks my love has been a waste. I’m not angry with her; I understand how she could think this way. And it is true that I was the one who did all the loving. Yet does that matter? ‘Isn’t it enough that there is love?’ I ask her. ‘That it exists. That a person can love, no matter if there’s only one person in the equation? My father used to say that being able to love another person was the most important thing.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, Tom—’ and she takes my hand and holds it between both of hers and I want to give her something, I want to give her reasons.

  And so I tell her suddenly that other reason why I stayed on at St Finbar’s and became a priest. The one I’ve kept secret, never telling anyone. ‘It was that time we were up on the hillside and he was so unhappy, that time he said, “They may as well cut our balls off!” and I said, “You could always leave.” He was so shocked, Miri, so—amazed. He said, “I’ll never leave!” and there was this look on his face, Miri, like a kind of rapture—I know he meant it. I know he wanted to stay, more than anything on earth. He’d made that promise, see? And then—’ my voice falters, she’s staring so hard at me, ‘and then after all, he—he couldn’t stay. So I took it on for him, I kept the promise for him. I stayed instead of him.’

  I stop. My heart is pounding in my chest at the thought of what she’s going to say. The reply I expect is the sensible one, because Miri’s always sensible and she has no truck with my romantic notions. So I don’t know why my heart is pounding, since I know just what she’s going to reply—it will be along these lines: ‘But Tom, he did leave. He ran away. He changed his mind, he didn’t care about that promise anymore. He wouldn’t have wanted you to live a life he’d decided he no longer wanted—to go and live it for him. To waste your life for him! Of course he wouldn’t!’

  Only—she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say anything. Instead her eyes slide away from mine as if she’s embarrassed, like your eyes might slide away from a dying friend who keeps on saying he’s well. My heart stops pounding then; it begins to beat steadily and evenly though I don’t feel steady and even; it’s like it’s trying to fool someone, pretending.

  She knows. I feel terrified. ‘I’ll go make us a cuppa,’ I say, backing away from her into the kitchen.

  My hands are shaking as I fill the jug and set a fan of her favourite biscuits out on a plate. I think, she knows, and I wonder how long she has known, how long she has put up with my pretending, my dearest Miri. In the room next door I hear the TV go on, the sound muffled because I’ve closed the kitchen door. When I take the tray in, Miri is sitting very still with her eyes fixed on the screen.

  Etta is there.

  You do see him on the screen from time to time. He’s gone far in the church, though not as far as we boys at St Finbar’s expected him to go. For certain church matters they use him as spokesman—he’s quite unflappable, everyone says so, there’s never a trace of flush on those pallid cheeks, never the faintest indication of humour, of rage or shame. His voice still holds a trace of the reediness of the fifteen-year-old, but what he says is always calm and rational. However close his opponents may come, Etta is never roused. The sign of a true psychopath, I think.

  ‘It’s him,’ says Miri, turning.

  ‘I know,’ I say, calm as a psychopath myself, arranging the cups and saucers carefully on the table.

  ‘Want me to change the channel?’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ When he comes on and I’m alone I turn him off at once. Now Miri is here, now I know she’s guessed my secret, I go on watching. I don’t sit down. I stand.

  His soutane is immaculate, his shoes shine. There are times when I think I must have imagined him up there on the hillside the night that Frankie disappeared: that air of dishevelment, the damp hair and crumpled cassock, its hem smeared with greyish sand, that little rent where the second button used to be. Imagined that strange hasty way in w
hich he spoke, the things he said, that last terrible scream, as if he were undone. Yes, that’s it. Undone. He was undone, because he—

  Perhaps I dreamed it, like the time I dreamed St Thomas Aquinas was sitting on my bed. I could have. I had lots of dreams back then. Except there’s those little white paws, clasping and unclasping, right here, right now, washing and wringing on my television screen, still struggling to get clean. I can almost hear the raspy whispery sound of that parched tormented skin.

  ‘Oh, look,’ whispers Miri. ‘Look what he’s doing with his hands. Like Lady Macbeth.’ I say nothing, and she turns round in her chair. ‘Are you all right, Tom?’

  Because I’m halfway across the room already, walking backwards towards the doorway. I hold out my hands to her, palms upward, as if to push her concern away. ‘Fine, fine,’ I say. ‘Need a breath of fresh air, that’s all. Out on the veranda.

  In your beautiful glider.’

  ‘I should have switched the channel.’

  ‘No, no, that’s all right, it’s not that, it’s not—I just need a moment, that’s all.’

  *

  Outside I sink down on the swing seat, lean my head against the soft cushions and look up at the glorious star-filled sky. For a long time after Frankie disappeared I was afraid of my bed, of those thoughts that came into my head when I lay down. Not thoughts, exactly—I don’t think I had real thoughts in those dreadful days. I had images, and I shut them out, I pretended they weren’t real. As you might say, my eyes were open, but their sense was closed. I pretended I believed what everyone else did, that Frankie had simply run away. I knew he hadn’t, but if you pretend something long enough you can forget you are pretending, the story you tell yourself becomes almost real. Even now, this very moment, when I look up at those stars, for a moment I still feel the comfort they’ve always given me, a promise that somewhere in this world Frankie is looking up at them too.

  Which is nonsense.

  I know Frankie is dead.

  Way down in that muddy region at the bottom of my mind I’ve known it since the night he disappeared. I knew it when I visited Currawong the first time and sat with old Ted Stormer in his living room, drinking orange cordial, the big chunk of ice rattling against the glass. I knew it every time I picked up the telephone and half expected to hear his voice, every time I went to the mailbox, imagining a letter from him might be inside. At St Finbar’s, when I sneaked to the ledge where Frankie used to go and watch the sunrise, I knew what I was searching for in those cracks and hollows and murky pools: the button ripped from Etta’s cassock, held for a moment, in Frankie’s desperate hand.

  It would have happened there, on the ledge, in that place my mother said was like a picture of the end. Frankie would have been watching the dark sea, the sickle moon bright above it, and Etta would have come creeping up on him. Frankie might have heard his footsteps, and turned—or perhaps he didn’t, thinking it was me—and then it was too late. Etta’s small determined paw thrust out and pushing, Frankie bewildered, unsteady on that pitted rock, grabbing at Etta, catching at that button which comes off in his hand and goes over with him. My teeth clench at that long astonished falling through the dark—and the end of it: the extinguishing of the lovely, lovely world. All these years when I’ve been too afraid to admit the meaning of those images: grey sand on a cassock, a missing button, a pitted ledge above the sea—I’ve let my lovely Frankie fall forever. Fear is a kind of wickedness: I’ve let him fall over and over, fall and fall and fall.

  A breeze stirs the bushes in the garden, ah ah, it says, so gently, ah ah ah, the very same sound I heard that long-ago morning on the beach at Shoreham when Frankie’s little ghost stood there next to me, watching the rosy sea.

  The breeze drops. He’s gone.

  ‘Miri!’ I call out. ‘Miri!’

  She comes.

  *

  Later on I go out and walk my old familiar route, the one Frankie took that night, the long way down Jellicoe Lane where he met Manda Sutton and everything flowed from there.

  ‘I should have told,’ I’d said to Miri. ‘I should have told them at St Finbar’s what I thought had happened.’

  ‘But you didn’t know. Not really.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘In here, perhaps.’ She tapped the front of my shirt, like she always does. Left side; she’s got it right for good, now. ‘But not in any way that people would accept, Tom. No one would have believed you. You were only a kid.’

  ‘But later—when I wasn’t a kid anymore.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘They still wouldn’t have believed you.’

  ‘You believe me.’

  ‘That’s because I know you. Because I’ve listened to you talking about Frankie for, oh—years and years. I can put all the bits together, but to anyone else, it’s only supposition.’ She threw out her hands. ‘There was no proof, Tom. Not then, not now. No one really saw anything, not even you.’

  ‘There was the sand—on Etta’s cassock and his boots. The only place you get that kind of sand is up there on that track to the ledge.’

  She shrugged. ‘He cleaned it off. It was only your word again. Anyway, the sand only meant he was there in that place, not that he did anything to Frankie. He could simply have been following him. Your word against his, again. And nothing more.’

  We were both quiet for a minute. Then suddenly she flashed me her old smile. ‘We could buy a gun and shoot him,’ she said. ‘We’re ancient, no one will put us away.’

  I smiled back at her sadly. I saw Frankie falling, falling, I saw Etta’s little paws again, clasping and unclasping, washing and wringing—Out, vile spot!—and my eyes flicked towards the desk in the corner of the room. In the second drawer there’s a letter opener, an innocent gift from a friend that I’ve never used. Its narrow wooden sheath is painted prettily with birds and flowers, inside the silvery blade of the stiletto gleams. I imagine strolling up to Etta at some function, sliding it swiftly through the smooth fabric of his soutane. It would be a silent death; I’m absolutely sure he’d make no sound. It could even be something he’d been waiting for, all these long, long years.

  Suddenly I heard myself asking Miri, ‘Do you think there might have been others?’ My voice was so low I’m surprised she could hear; the question swam up from that cloudy region of my mind, surfacing unexpectedly, like a half rotted-body from the bottom of a lake. It’s a question I’ve hidden from. Though once I did ask John Rushall—years after, as always. ‘Remember?’ I said. ‘Back at St Finbar’s, how you once told me Etta used to get these downs on some boys?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘There were only two. One left. One was expelled.’

  ‘Did you ever hear anything about them—I mean, later?’

  ‘Well, Bob Geary, he went into law; Paul Cummings went to London, got a teaching job at University College, eventually.’

  ‘So they were okay, then?’

  ‘Sure, last time I heard. And what about your friend? That one who left, the one you were so worried about that time? You hear from him? What’s he up to these days?’

  ‘Ah—’ I couldn’t answer. I took to my heels and left him.

  I simply ran.

  ‘Others?’ echoed Miri.

  ‘Other people Etta—’ John Rushall’s mild phrase slid softly from my tongue, ‘had a down on.’

  ‘Killed, you mean?’ she said quite calmly. ‘No, there wouldn’t have been.’

  ‘How—how do you know?’

  ‘I’m quite sure of that, Tom.’

  ‘Why? How can you be?’

  ‘From all you’ve told me. About Etta. About his—love. Can you call it that?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘All the same, Frankie would have been the only one for him.’

  The words bought a kind of desolation—to think that Etta and I also had this in common: that Frankie was the only one.