My Lovely Frankie Read online

  If it had been anyone else I could have understood Etta’s silence. If it had been John Rushall’s friend Simon Barber, for instance, I think he’d have figured how Frankie was new, a friendly boy from the country who might have forgotten in the sudden freedom of an afternoon outside that he was a novice from St Finbar’s who wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with girls. That it hadn’t sunk in yet. Simon Barber would have gone up to Frankie and given him a warning; he wouldn’t have reported him. He’d have let him off.

  Etta wasn’t like that. Everyone said that Etta never let anyone off, and that was what worried me. It was more than worry, it was like I’d had a whiff of something bad, something wrong. My thumbs pricked. On the way to my first class I saw John Rushall standing on the library veranda and I went up to him.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled at me. He had a broad, clear face where nothing seemed hidden and you felt it wouldn’t ever be, that messes and secrets simply weren’t part of him. My father liked him; my mother said he was a brave, reliable boy.

  ‘It’s about, um, about Etta.’

  ‘Etta.’ The smile didn’t vanish exactly, though it seemed to blur a little.

  ‘You know how everyone says he never lets you off anything?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, what if he does let you off? What if some kid does something against the rules, and Etta sees him, and then he doesn’t report it, he doesn’t do anything?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Big or small? This thing the kid does that’s against the rules?’

  It sounded an easy enough question, yet I found it hard to answer. When I pictured Frankie walking across the road to the girl, the first thing that struck me was how right he’d looked, as if he was doing exactly what he was meant to do. A beautiful girl turns round and smiles at a boy and he smiles back and takes a few steps towards her—what was wrong with that? It was good, wasn’t it? And surely it’s unkind to ignore another person smiling at you. Except when you turned it round the way Etta would see it, in terms of those rules set out in the little green book we carried in the pocket of our cassocks, then it was wrong. It was a big wrong. It was lust and the girl was an occasion of sin. ‘It depends,’ I said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what world you’re in. If you’re outside, if you aren’t at St Finbar’s, then it’s nothing. It’s just normal. If you’re here, then it’s wrong, it’s big, or—someone could make it seem big.’

  ‘And he hasn’t? We’re talking about Etta here?’ He lowered his voice and when I looked round I saw that without my noticing, we’d moved to the end of the veranda where an ivy-covered trellis hid us from anyone passing in the courtyard. ‘He hasn’t said anything to this kid? Hasn’t reported him?’

  ‘No. Why wouldn’t he? Why would he let it go?’

  He frowned slightly. Without his usual smile, his face looked sad and I remembered how he’d lost his father in the war. When I was little my mother used to take me to the library where his mother worked, and if school was out you’d see John at the back of the space behind the counter, reading, sitting very quiet on a chair.

  ‘Why would Etta let it go?’ I asked again.

  ‘Because whatever this boy’s done, it’s not big enough,’ he said at last, mysteriously to me.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He spread his hands. ‘It’s this way: if he’s got this kid in his sights, then he’s probably waiting.’

  ‘Waiting? What for?’

  ‘For him to do something bad enough to get chucked out.’

  ‘Chucked out! Why would he want to get some kid he doesn’t even know chucked out?’

  An odd expression flickered across that broad, open face: it was like he knew the answer, only he wasn’t sure whether to tell me, whether I’d understand. He considered me for a moment and I could tell this made him even more doubtful. I was small for my age as well as young for it. I was pale and dark-haired, dark-eyed, and as I stood there it occurred to me suddenly that I looked like the boy I’d imagined Frankie to be in those days before I’d actually seen him. Only I was green as grass. Frankie wasn’t.

  ‘The thing is,’ said John, and I could tell from his voice he’d decided I was too green to understand the thing he wasn’t going to tell me, ‘Etta’s ambitious, like I said before. He wants to get to the top.’

  ‘The top?’ He was right, I didn’t understand.

  ‘In the Church. He wants to be a bishop one day. Or an archbishop, or even higher, who knows?’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with Frankie?’

  ‘Frankie? He’s that kid who came late, isn’t he? The big blond kid from out west? The good-looking one?’

  It startled me to hear him say this. Good-looking. Frankie was. I blushed. ‘Yes.’

  John caught at a strand of ivy and pulled off a leaf. He studied it for a moment before he looked up at me. ‘Well, look, let’s just say, Etta gets these downs on people. Then he thinks they’re in his way—in the way of his getting on, I mean—so then he wants them out, see?’

  ‘But why would he get a down on Frankie? How could Frankie get in his way?’

  He sighed. ‘Look, the best thing your Frankie can do is keep out of his way. Tell him to try and keep out of trouble, even small kinds of trouble, like being late. Etta’s really good at making small things add up to something big. He writes stuff down. He’s got this notebook he keeps in his pocket, I call it the Book of Little Things. He’s probably got a few entries on your mate already, so tell him to be careful, eh?’

  A bell rang. ‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘No sense in you being late too.’

  As I began to hurry away he called after me, ‘Take care.’ Take care—it wasn’t the common expression it is today and I remember it gave me a faint feeling of alarm, as if John Rushall thought I was in a dangerous place.

  *

  The class I had that period was Philosophy. Frankie’s was Latin, which he hadn’t done at his old school. His classroom was two doors up from mine, I’d pass it on my way. I still hadn’t spoken to him that morning. He hadn’t come up to me after breakfast and I wondered if he felt embarrassed about the private stuff he’d told me last night. I should have known better, even then. Frankie wasn’t the kind of person who got anxious about such things. And I needn’t have worried because when I passed the window of the Latin class Frankie looked up as I looked in, and his face lit up when he saw me and he waved.

  His Latin teacher was Dr Gorman. Dr Gorman was tall and very thin, and the thick pebbly glasses he wore gave his narrow face a blind, foggy look. When he took them off you saw his eyes were sharp and clear. He was standing right in front of Frankie’s desk. He looked at Frankie and then he looked out at me and back to Frankie again. Frankie hardly noticed him; he was still smiling and waving through the window. Dr Gorman took off his pebbly glasses and polished them with his handkerchief, then he put them on again, touched Frankie gently on the shoulder and said something to him. And then Frankie said something and Dr Gorman smiled and Frankie gave me one last wave and turned back to his notebook, and I felt suddenly so happy I could hardly breathe.

  9.

  ‘Tell him to try and keep out of trouble,’ John Rushall had said, but this was impossible. Right from the start, Frankie was always in trouble. Most of it was small stuff: being late, running in the corridors, talking in class—Frankie loved to talk. Perhaps the girl down in Shoreham was only a little thing too, no more than a simple forgetting because he was new. Though I knew he still dreamed of her.

  The real problem was that he stood out. We were not meant to stand out; we were supposed to forget our individual selves, submerge them in devotion to God. It wasn’t that Frankie meant to draw attention to himself—he wasn’t vain or conceited, he wasn’t showing off—it was simply that there was something about him which drew people. He was like a warm light in a cold dark room. It was the brightness in him, I think, the way he delighted in the lovel
iness of the world, in all those ordinary things we were meant to put aside.

  One breezy morning a group of us were crossing the courtyard on our way to chapel when Frankie stopped and pointed up towards the tower. It was a feast day, and the saint’s flag was flying, flapping gaily with a clean snapping sound. ‘I love that sound!’ he said, turning to the rest of us, his eyes shining.

  It was an odd thing to say, at least it was amongst a group of 1950s teenage boys, yet not one us tapped at his forehead or twirled a finger at his temple, or told Frankie he was barmy, like we might have done if it had been anyone else. I remember that morning so clearly: the blue sky, the little white clouds, the utter clarity of the air, in which the leaves of the bushes seemed to tremble with light—and the four of us, Frankie and me, Tim Vesey and Joey Gertler, all looking up at the banner and all of us listening intently to the sound of its flapping, in a way we never had before. We hadn’t noticed, and now we did. We’d have missed so many things if it hadn’t been for him. He showed us stuff, he really did. Everyone was smiling, and Tim said, ‘Yeah, I love it too!’

  On that glorious morning I was the only one who felt anxious. I was often like this when I was with Frankie. I was so happy to be with him that my whole body felt a kind of lightness, yet behind this airy happiness there was foreboding, a dark apprehension that at any moment this joy might be snatched away. I couldn’t get John Rushall’s words about Etta out of my head: ‘He gets these downs on people—and then he wants them out.’ Whenever Frankie and I were together, I’d be looking all round for Etta, in the shadows of a room or courtyard, in the trees at the edge of the playing field, up at a high window where a face might be. I’d listen for his footsteps in the corridor at night and I’d imagine him in his room, his big domed head bent over his notebook, writing down the little things that could add up to the big one for which Frankie could be sent away.

  Frankie began sharing his food with the little kids, the ones who’d come to St Finbar’s straight from primary school and slept in the long dormitory upstairs. At mealtimes he’d slip stuff into the big pockets of his cassock: a couple of sausages, a few slices of corned beef, roast potatoes, the iced buns we sometimes had for dessert, anything portable. It was hardly hygienic, but the little kids didn’t care about the odd piece of fluff or a few grains of sand. When our meal was over, Frankie would share the stuff out in the small yard at the back of the refectory kitchen.

  I was on the kitchen duty roster the day that he was caught and I saw the whole thing through the open kitchen window. We rarely had fruit at our meals, but that morning a fresh orange had miraculously appeared beside each plate, and there was Frankie outside in that dank little yard, surrounded by a crowd of the little kids, dividing oranges into segments for them. They were scrawny, these little kids, scrawny and scraggy, and they reminded me of the kids I’d seen at the old army camp playing in that muddy paddock like little ghosts in the dark. Close up you saw a kind of wildness in their eyes, as if they didn’t know quite where they were, or how they’d got there, or why—and some of the St Finbar’s kids had that look: it seemed almost odd to see them laughing as they clustered round Frankie.

  That kitchen yard was gloomy as the inside of a box, shadowed by walls on three sides, high windows glinting down. A tall hedge of prickly holly bounded the fourth side, a rough gateway cut into its centre. In my memory the scene has a kind of glow to it—the dark yard, the tall boy with the smaller ones gathered round him, all in their long black robes, so that the only colours were the pale gleam of blond hair and the vivid shocking dazzle of the oranges. It was like leafing through some dry old book and coming unexpectedly on a beautiful picture shut inside the dusty pages.

  He had six oranges. Six! Standing there at the window I remember feeling a tiny stab of jealousy wondering which kids at his table had given their fruit to him. I envied them. I didn’t like this envy or the growing desire I felt to have Frankie all to myself, yet I could do nothing about it. Such feelings seemed to have become a part of me. They had taken hold.

  There was no one else in the kitchen, the other kids on duty roster had already gone, and the nuns who did the domestic work at St Finbar’s didn’t arrive till ten. I glanced up at the high windows of the building on the far side of the courtyard, they caught the sun and glared back at me. You couldn’t see if there was anyone behind the glass, and I thought of Etta looking down, the Book of Little Things in his hand. There was nothing in our rule book that said you couldn’t keep your food back and share it with the others, but I knew this was only because the rule makers hadn’t thought of it; they hadn’t imagined a situation where a kid might give his food away. If they had, there’d have been a rule for sure. Everything was like that in St Finbar’s; behind the printed rules there were others you only found out when you broke them, though you always had a shadowy sense that they were there.

  I pushed the window open. I was about to call out to Frankie when heavy footsteps sounded on the path beyond the hedge. The little kids went quiet. I saw one of them shove his orange pieces into his pocket and put his hands behind his back quickly, the others simply waited to see if the person out there would come through the gate or pass by harmlessly. Frankie went on peeling another orange, quite unconcerned, like a person from another world. The footsteps came nearer. If I’d thought about it for a moment I’d have worked out from the heaviness of those steps that it couldn’t be Etta; Etta was too light, his feet too small to make that solid sound. It was Father Stuckey who walked in through the gate in the hedge.

  He was the youngest of our teachers, a big shy man with spiky brown hair and a plain eager face with bright red cheeks like a child’s. He taught the junior classes their ordinary school subjects and took all of us for sport. He loved sport, any kind, football and cricket and handball and tennis. We didn’t have any tennis courts at St Finbar’s but there was an old practice wall out near the vegetable gardens and sometimes you’d see Father Stuckey there with an old racquet, whacking a ball against the concrete for half an hour.

  ‘Whoa!’ he called as the little kids scattered past him like a flock of tatty black birds and disappeared through the hedge. He stared after them, shaking his head, and then turned back to Frankie, who stood there with a couple of oranges still in his hands. You could see Father Stuckey working it out, looking at the oranges and then back at the gap in the hedge where the kids had disappeared; putting two and two together and making a St Finbar’s four. As I said, there was no written rule against keeping your food back and then giving it to others and Father Stuckey was no hardliner—all the same, when he began talking to Frankie you could see he was telling him not to do it again. I was pulling the window down when I heard Frankie cry out, ‘But they’re hungry!’ And when he said this I saw Father Stuckey’s whole body flinch and his big plain face flood with an expression you could only call shame. He put an arm round Frankie’s shoulders and together they walked across the yard and out through the gate in the hedge.

  *

  It was true we were hungry sometimes, especially the youngest ones. By hungry I don’t mean we were starved—we had three meals a day. We had meat: watery mince and corned beef and sausages and roast lamb on Sundays; we had boiled vegetables: potato and carrots and pumpkin; we had desserts: rice pudding or iced buns or steamed pudding with bright yellow custard. And bread, lots of it, as much as we could eat, though only one slice with butter. So we had food; it was simply that it never seemed enough. There was a raw feeling in our stomachs most of the time. Joey Gertler in my Philosophy class told me he thought about food all day and when he woke at night he’d picture the ingredients of the special hamburgers you could buy at the fish-and-chip shop in his home town: soft brown fried onions, juicy red tomatoes, fried egg, fresh crisp lettuce, and then the meat itself: the deep rich colour of it, the melted fat in glistening runnels in the patty’s ridges and grooves. ‘I never knew food could make you cry,’ he said.

  If she’d heard all this my mother
would have commented, ‘It simply wasn’t enough for growing boys.’ And I could picture my father frowning slightly, compressing his lips as if he’d expected exactly this kind of thing. I thought about my parents often; I thought about how they hadn’t wanted me to come and how, in my eagerness, I’d felt they didn’t understand. Sometimes angry tears would rush into my eyes. It was anger for myself, not them.

  I’d had letters from them both. My mother wrote about my friends from school and the people in the neighbourhood. ‘We all miss you,’ she said. My father told me there’d been another epidemic of whooping cough amongst the children in the old army camp. ‘We kept them all, this time,’ he said, and he added at the bottom, ‘Remember we are always here.’

  I found it hard to answer these letters. We wrote home on Thursdays, and I would sit there for most of the hour, my mind frozen, trying to think what to write. In the relatively short time since I’d left home—two months it was, though it felt like years—I’d changed. The longing for glory had faded, and I’d lost that feeling of closeness to God. This was normal for the early days, my spiritual advisor told me. He was an elderly man called Father Barlow, who came up once a month from a theological college in the city. I was shedding false romanticism, he told me. Later on, as I became more robust in my faith, my sense of God would return. I must have patience, most of all I must have faith. I should concentrate on prayer. His very words, the utterly familiar words ‘faith’ and ‘prayer’ filled me with a wild impatience; I felt an urge to cry. They were like stones put in my mouth. Did Father Barlow notice? If he did he said nothing. Kneeling down beside him I would tense all over, fighting back the tears. How can you pray if the Being you’re talking to seems to have gone away? It felt like talking to yourself. ‘First sign of madness’, people say, and sometimes I thought we were mad, all of us, stuck on that cold hillside, thinking we were the children of God. I didn’t want to tell these things to my parents; I didn’t want to tell them to anyone.