My Lovely Frankie Read online

  That brown fibre mat outside our back door! At home I’d hardly noticed it, now I would see it over and over. I would remember how it was caramel-coloured in dry weather and chocolate in the rain and how in summer its surface was dry and pleasantly prickly, and I longed with all my heart to be standing on it, to feel those dense rough fibres against my bare soles. And my parents! I would wake from that first dead sleep and feel for the torch I kept beside my pillow, shine it on the face of my watch to find the time, then I’d picture what they would be doing at home: my mother reading in her armchair, my father coming in from a night call, the sharp chink of china on the concrete step as he put out the jug for the milkman. The jug was made of pale green china, and even to picture it brought a pang of loss so sharp I wanted to cry out loud.

  I was sick for home. ‘Offer it up to Christ,’ the teachers at my primary school would have said. I’d heard that phrase so many times and never really thought about what it meant. Now, when I did, it hardly made sense to me. Why would God want pain and suffering offered to him? Why would he like it? Wouldn’t he want happiness? Wouldn’t he want lovely things?

  And then, on my fourth night of homesickness, Frankie arrived. I heard footsteps on the stairs and in the corridor, a door opening, something heavy being dragged across the floor of the room next to mine, the sound of a bright voice exclaiming, ‘Is that the window?’ Someone hushing it. ‘Shhh!’ The door closed, footsteps hurried down the stairs. I heard my new neighbour sigh, a long tired sigh, so close it startled me. I heard his shoes drop to the floor; as he flung himself onto his bed the wall between us seemed to shudder. I put my hand against it and felt a faint tremor; it was no more than a plywood partition where a larger room had been divided into two. That night I heard the long whisper of my new neighbour’s prayers through it, I heard each shift of his body on the bed, I heard him cough once, and then a long silence as if he’d gone to sleep. A few minutes later I heard his voice again, slightly muffled, as if he’d turned his face into the pillow. ‘Sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,’ and for a moment, before I realised he couldn’t possibly know I was there, or that I could hear him, I thought he was speaking to me. Then he really did fall asleep.

  I didn’t see him in the morning. His door was closed. I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard the bell and was still sleeping, but when I knocked to warn him there was no response. He must have got up early. The same thing happened the next morning and the next. In the evenings I lingered on the stairway, watching the boys come up to their rooms, looking for him—this went on for several days, yet we always seemed to miss each other. I had no real idea what he might look like, though that muffled ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry’, which he repeated every night, had made me picture him as a pale, smallish boy, narrow-faced, with dark hair and big dark eyes, and in the next few days I looked around the refectory and my classes for a new boy like this. It was impossible to find him because most of the boys were new to me, and so many were small and sallow and dark-haired. Yet though I never saw him, I had a feeling of closeness because every night I heard that ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry’ and those whispered, hasty prayers, and the soft breathing of his sleep, as close to me as if his head was on the pillow next to mine. Once I heard him wake from a nightmare and cry out, ‘No, no. No! I didn’t do it, Dad!’ His voice shook with terror.

  Three whole days and a night passed before I finally saw him. It was in the chapel. Mass had ended and we were walking slowly towards the doors when there was a sudden hold-up to our procession. Halfway down the aisle a boy had stopped. He stood very still, his face lifted towards a high window where a pane of opaque glass had been opened and a strip of bright blue sky was shining, and the branches of a gum tree tossing in the breeze. I knew him at once, though physically he was nothing like the boy I’d imagined. He wasn’t small and dark and sad-eyed, he was tall and big-boned, his skin tanned, his hair that rich buttery blond that is almost golden brown. He swung his arm gaily towards the window, inviting us all to look up and share that blue sky and the glittering, dancing leaves. Some boys did look, others shuffled uneasily and kept their eyes down, for we were not supposed to stop and gaze about us, to be distracted by the things of the ordinary world. One boy—it was Bri Tobin, though I didn’t know him then—looked up and smiled in sheer delight, then his face turned pure bright red and he lowered his head again, and I was reminded of the way Father James would sneak a glance at my mother across our dinner table and then look away again quickly as if it was a sin. Then, in the shadows by the doorway, someone moved, and a voice called out, ‘Guard your eyes!’

  It was Etta. The shadows hid him, yet that thin reedy voice was distinctive. I knew it from our mealtimes, when he stood to make the announcements from the senior table. Already in those first few days I’d heard the rumours about him: he was the head prefect, and he never let you off the smallest thing, not even on bush picnic days. Students whispered his name, looking over their shoulders—they said he had a thousand eyes, like a fly. They made him sound dangerous and sticky, like a creature waiting in a web.

  John Rushall had warned me about him. John was a senior student who’d once gone to my old school. His mother worked in our local library; she was a friend of my mother’s and I suspected John had been asked to keep an eye on me. He told me the same things the others had, that Etta never let you off, and that if you got into his bad books he’d never let you go. ‘His real name’s Brian Cooley,’ John had told me, ‘but everyone calls him Etta.’

  ‘Etta? What kind of name is that?’

  ‘No one knows. He just came with it, from primary school.’

  Years later, at a conference, I asked my friend Vin Taylor about that nickname. Vin had been with Etta at primary school. ‘No one at St Finbar’s seemed to know what it meant,’ I said. ‘Though it suited him, somehow.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Vin. ‘It suited him all right.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Spell it backwards.’

  I did. ‘A-t-t-e. Atte?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Vin. ‘Not Etta, not the girl’s name. It’s Etah.

  Try that.’

  I tried it. H-a-t-e. It chilled my blood to think that little kids could sense that in him, when they were all so young.

  There were bishops in his family, John Rushall had told me. Not just one bishop, like some of us had, but several. ‘He’ll be one himself one day, you can bet on it, that’s why he’s here. He’s ambitious, watch out for him.’

  ‘Guard your eyes!’ that reedy voice called out again. Frankie didn’t seem to hear it, his whole attention was fixed on the window, on the waving branches and shining leaves and now a single magpie which flew down, settled on a branch, threw back its small gleaming head and trilled out a long gurgling note. ‘Oh, I love that!’ exclaimed Frankie, smiling round at us all.

  ‘Guard your eyes!’

  This time Frankie heard. He turned from the window and moved into line and as he did our eyes met and I caught my breath, like I used to do when I entered the old church at home. It was the briefest of contacts; in a moment he’d turned and begun to hurry down towards the door and I could see only the back of his head, that thick blondish hair which had a dull gleam like satin ribbon. You wanted to touch it. I must have been staring because the reedy voice rang out, and this time it was directed at me: ‘Guard your eyes!’

  6.

  A few days later I was on my way to morning classes when a prefect handed me a message from Father James. For a moment, hearing the familiar name, unfolding the note and finding the spiky handwriting I’d seen so often on letters lying on the table in our hall, I was afraid that something had happened back home. I think the loneliness and homesickness of that first week had got to me, made me feel the world was an uncertain and dangerous place. I no longer had the sense of God’s hand stretched protectively above my head; it wasn’t there, and sometimes at night I worried that it never had been. That I’d made it up.

  The message tu
rned out to have nothing to do with my family. Surprisingly, it was about Frankie. He had an abscessed tooth and Father James had chosen me to accompany him down to the dentist in Shoreham. The appointment was for four o’clock and I was to meet Frankie at the main gates at three-fifteen. We were excused afternoon study and would be expected back for Benediction at six-fifteen.

  When I arrived at the gates at ten past three, Frankie was already waiting. Though we still hadn’t really met or even spoken to each other, his face lit when he saw me coming, as if I was his oldest friend. Frankie liked people; this was how he was with almost everyone—for him, they were part of the loveliness of the world. ‘You’re Tom,’ he said, and I remember feeling a little thrill of pleasure that he knew my name, even though I realised Father James would probably have told it to him. ‘You’ve got the room next to mine,’ he went on. ‘I can—’ He gave a little gasp as the cold air struck his mouth, and I saw how one side of his jaw was swollen. It must have hurt badly, because for a moment he closed his eyes. ‘Don’t try and talk,’ I said, and we started down the road in silence, but at the first bend, where the road dropped and there was a high bank which protected us a little from the wind, he began to talk again. ‘I’ve never been to a dentist before,’ he confided.

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘There wasn’t one where we lived.’ He spoke in the past tense, like most of us did now when we talked about our homes, even the little kids in the dormitory upstairs, though some of them were still of an age when—if no one was looking—they might have let their mother hold their hand.

  The only boy I knew who didn’t talk about his home in this way was Tim Vesey, who had a room on my floor, on the other side of the stairs. He could still see his house; it was on the opposite headland, across the bay. I’d noticed him several times standing at the window on the first floor landing; once he’d beckoned me over and pointed the house out to me. You could see the back of it quite clearly, even the clothes line in the middle of the long back yard. ‘I saw Mum yesterday,’ he’d told me, ‘hanging out the clothes.’

  ‘Oh!’ I couldn’t quite believe him. To see your mother.

  Hanging out the clothes—being ordinary—it seemed somehow impossible.

  ‘All right! Don’t believe me,’ said Tim Vesey angrily.

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard to, in this place. You know?’

  He nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and ran away up the stairs.

  ‘From where we lived,’ said Frankie, ‘the nearest dentist was a hundred miles.’

  ‘A hundred miles!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do if you got toothache?’

  ‘Waited till it went away.’ He winced again. ‘I never had one like this, but.’

  I thought he might want to know if the dentist hurt; instead it turned out he was worried the college would send a bill to his father. There wasn’t much money for extra things like that at home, he confided; there were a lot of them and his dad would blow his top if an unexpected bill arrived. ‘Really blow his top,’ he added with a little shudder, and I remembered how I’d heard him wake from a nightmare shouting, ‘No, no. No! I didn’t do it, Dad!’

  ‘You can’t help it if you get toothache,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I think the dentist here would treat you for free.’

  ‘Why? Why would he do it for free?’

  ‘Well, because we come from there.’ I turned and pointed back towards the seminary, and as I did I thought I saw a flash of movement in the big trees beside the gates, as if someone had been hiding there and quickly moved away. I couldn’t be sure though, because the wind unsettled everything.

  ‘And so he wouldn’t send Dad a bill?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Frankie studied the seminary for a moment, thoughtfully.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked me. ‘This place? Being here?’

  I didn’t know what to say. It was all too complicated. Sometimes I thought I hated the place, at others, in chapel, caught up in the beautiful words of the liturgy, I loved it. ‘I haven’t made up my mind,’ I said.

  He smiled at me. ‘It’s hard.’ It was then that I noticed his eyes. They were that same mysterious colour as the dark blue patches I’d seen floating on the sea that long-ago day at the sea-baths in Myall. Indigo. To gaze into Frankie’s eyes gave me that same feeling of richness I’d had back then.

  ‘Oh, look!’ He was pointing upwards. A hawk had appeared there, hovering so low you could see the individual feathers, the patterns they made, the way they interleaved. It rose and wheeled away into the sky. ‘Did you see him?’ His voice trembled with a kind of urgency. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and he flashed me a look of triumph, as if it was the greatest joy to him that something so beautiful could be there, in the world, with him.

  *

  The dentist’s surgery was in a side street behind the shopping centre. I waited on the front steps while Frankie went inside. It was wonderful simply to sit there and watch the people go by in the street, ordinary people—a postman on his bicycle, an old man walking his dog, two ladies about my mother’s age with shopping baskets on their arms. Ordinary people. ‘Externs’ our teachers called them—the term meant anyone who wasn’t a priest or a student priest, anyone who was ‘outside’. When I’d first heard the word it had given me a prickly, irritable feeling, and late at night, when I woke up and thought about home, it made me really angry. My parents were externs too. I wanted to run to Father James’ room, bang on his door and shout, ‘Why do you go and visit my parents, then, if they’re externs?’

  ‘Tom!’

  Frankie was on the veranda. ‘Tom, look!’

  I jumped up from the steps. He was holding out his hand and in the centre of his palm lay the larger part of a back tooth, its root long and gleaming. He lifted it between two fingers. ‘Look, it’s an actual piece of me!’

  I loved the way he spoke, as if I was an old friend, as if he’d known me all his life. Behind him the dentist and the nurse stood smiling. You could see from their faces how they liked him too. Everyone liked Frankie—I think it was the brightness in him, the way his long, rather bony face would light up when something pleased him. The brightness was in his voice, too—people turned their heads when they heard it, it made you think of light.

  ‘It didn’t hurt at all!’ He took a grubby hanky from his pocket and began to wrap the tooth inside it, carefully. ‘I’m going to keep it for always! I’m going to show it to my kids!’

  When he said this, the smiles left the faces of his two new friends. The nurse looked almost tearful, for a moment I thought she was going to cry, and there was a flash of something very much like anger in the dentist’s eyes, an anger that wasn’t for Frankie, but for the long black cassock he was wearing. At the time I didn’t really understand that there were people who felt angry at the way young boys were gathered into the priesthood before they were old enough to know what they would lose. All the same, I had a sudden vivid flash of my father’s fist pounding on the sill that night we came back from our visit to the seminary, and I remembered my mother saying, ‘You’ll never have a wife, a family.’ And though the idea of having a family still didn’t seem important for me, I could see it at once in relation to Frankie. It was so easy to imagine him with little kids, and I guessed this was what the nurse was thinking too. She went over and kissed him. He was so happy, then! He put his hands up to his cheek and laughed. ‘Good luck, Frankie,’ she said.

  Outside in the street, he caught at my sleeve. ‘Can we go that way?’ He was pointing to a narrow lane across the road. At the end of it was a blue glimpse of ocean behind a row of Norfolk pines.

  ‘I’ve never seen the sea before.’

  ‘You haven’t? What about when you came? You know, when you got off the bus in Shoreham?’

  ‘It was dark. And I didn’t know which way to go; it was hard enough finding how to get to St Finbar’s. When someone final
ly told me the way I was so tired I just went straight there.’ He stared longingly down the lane. ‘None of us have seen the sea in my family, except for Mum, when she was little.’

  I looked at my watch. Frankie’s appointment hadn’t taken very long and there was plenty of time for a detour to the beach and watch the waves coming in, so we crossed the road and began to walk down the lane. It was a windy day but the town wind was different from the one we knew up on our headland. The wind up there was like a savage, especially at night, shrieking across the open spaces, rattling at the windows, beating at the walls. The wind down here was gentler; it was like a happy child tearing about the streets and gardens, tugging at our cassocks, pulling at our hair. When we reached the end of the lane a great cloud of sea mist came tumbling all around us. Frankie batted at it with his fists, laughing. ‘What is this stuff?’ he yelled. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s spray, from the sea.’ A gust of wind rushed down the Esplanade and the mist fell back like curtains from a window and showed the sea, breakers rolling in, great glossy ones with the spray flying off them like banners. ‘Look, Frankie, look!’

  He’d been whirling round like a little kid, his arms stretched wide, now he stopped and stared. His arms fell to his sides, beneath the tan his face paled with a kind of happy shock. ‘Is that—it’s—’ he yelled it out, ‘the sea, the sea! The sea!’ and soon I was yelling it too. ‘The sea! The sea! The sea!’

  ‘Come on!’

  We forgot all about being students from St Finbar’s. We tore across the road. We didn’t bother with the steps, hurling ourselves from the low wall onto the sand, pounding down the beach towards the water. Frankie was faster than me, he reached the edge before I was halfway down, and when I caught up with him he was standing perfectly still, absorbed, entranced, his eyes fixed on the blue line of the horizon and the white crests of the waves rolling in and spilling up the sand. Despite all the running, his face was still oddly pale, and suddenly he closed his eyes, like he’d done when we were coming down the hill and the wind had struck his jaw.