My Lovely Frankie Page 7

  We wrote our letters in the library. I would glance across to the table where Frankie sat, his blond head bent over his letter, the left arm curved protectively around the sheet. I wondered if he was writing to that father who’d told him he’d offended Heaven, or the mother who’d whispered that she was too ashamed to say her prayers; I wondered if he got letters back. If he did he never said anything about them.

  I couldn’t tell my parents about Frankie, not properly. I told them I’d made friends with the boy in the room next to mine, and how he’d come from this little town out west, but I couldn’t describe him to them. I couldn’t tell them about the deep indigo colour of his eyes and how it made me feel rich, or about the buttery gold of his hair, the satiny texture which made me want to touch it—these details were secrets, precious and somehow dangerous. I couldn’t tell them how important he was to me, how he was becoming the best thing in my world. I couldn’t tell anyone, I hardly admitted it to myself. And I said nothing about Etta. In the last minutes before the bell I’d panic, longing to share with them like I used to do, only I couldn’t, I couldn’t—I’d scribble a few pathetic lines about what we were studying in classes and what sports we played. I knew it wasn’t enough. I knew it didn’t even sound like me. I knew they’d notice, yet there was no way I could think how to put it right. I couldn’t sound as I used to sound. Something was happening to me.

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Miri when I told her all this. ‘You were starting to grow up. And beginning to fall in—’

  ‘Don’t!’ I hushed her. ‘Don’t say it, Miri.’

  You can never hush Miri. She picked up the edges of her sensible tweed skirt like a little girl at a dancing school recital. Plonk! went her stout brogues on the wooden boards of my veranda. Plonk! Plonk! Then she stood still, clasping her hands at her waist like a little girl about to recite a poem, and began to sing softly,

  Falling in love again

  Never wanted to

  What am I to do

  ‘Stop it, Miri!’

  Of course she didn’t stop. Nothing ever stopped Miri.

  I can’t help it!

  ‘No more!’ But I was laughing, and though it must have been at least thirty years then from my time at St Finbar’s and I was getting on for fifty, I swear my face grew warm and I was blushing like some sad old lovelorn teenager.

  10.

  Hayden Jarrell was the smallest of the young kids in the dormitory upstairs. With his narrow pointed face and skinny limbs he looked barely older than nine. ‘Hay’, his friends called him (‘Hey, hey, Hay!’) and it suited his straw-coloured hair and the sandy skin speckled all over with freckles the size of threepenny bits.

  ‘He comes from up my way,’ Frankie told me one afternoon when a group of us were out clearing scrub to extend the vegetable gardens. ‘Way out past Yulla it is—this little place right on the edge of the desert; blink when you’re passing through and you’d miss it for sure.’ He threw down his pick and cupped his hands together and it was like he was holding Hay Jarrell’s little town between his palms. He made you see it: the wide main street with its dusty peppercorns, the general store that was also the bank and the post office, the single petrol pump outside, a couple of parked utes and a dog stretched out in a skinny piece of shade. ‘He misses it,’ said Frankie. ‘And his family. He’s an only, like you—so there’s just him and his mum and dad. Imagine.’ He shook his head and grabbed up the pick and took a swing at the stony ground. ‘I bet they really love him.’

  I forgot. I didn’t think of the things he’d told me about his family: the beatings, the silences, the absence of love. ‘Of course they love him,’ I said. ‘They’re his mum and dad, aren’t they?’ Even as I spoke the words too fast, too fast, I sensed the hurt there might be in them for him and I could have bitten out my tongue. He said nothing and the look he gave me I couldn’t work out, not then, anyway. It was neither scornful nor reproachful, it was the kind of look you might give a little kid who couldn’t help saying stupid things because he was too young to know anything.

  ‘Hay’s only eleven,’ he went on. ‘Can you imagine being eleven and being here? Can you remember eleven?’

  I thought of certain lovely days. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I can.’

  We went back to chopping at the stony soil in silence. When we paused for breath he said, ‘He’s got this little stammer.

  Have you noticed?’

  ‘Hay?’

  ‘Yeah. He says he didn’t have it before. He says this place frightens him, and some of the people—well, he’s only little. I told him it’s no good being scared of people; if you get scared, then they win.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I thought of Etta, of course. I still had the feeling that if I said his name to Frankie it would be like pressing a button on some dreadful mechanism. It was now almost two months since that afternoon down in Shoreham and nothing had ever come of it—that didn’t mean it wasn’t written down in Etta’s Book of Little Things, of course, yet though I watched for him all the time, I’d never once actually seen him spying on Frankie. There’d been no repetition of that strange stare I’d witnessed down in Shoreham which, when I recalled it, could still send a shiver down my spine. Just because I didn’t see him watching didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  ‘Some people are scary,’ I said uneasily.

  Frankie stuck his pick in the ground and leaned on it. ‘Like who?’ His indigo eyes stared straight into mine. Still I said nothing.

  ‘Like who?’ he repeated.

  ‘Well, the Rector,’ I said, at last. ‘He’d scare the little kids.’

  Rufus Bowles was Rector at St Finbar’s. Red, the senior boys called him, and the name had nothing to do with his politics; it was given for the fits of rage which shook him from time to time, when his deep voice roared out and the great vein above his left eye twisted and writhed as if it would burst right through the skin. These days they’d say he had an anger management problem and send him off to do a course, though I doubt any course could have coped with Red. It was like he needed to be angry, like he was hungry for it, always looking for some titbit to make him mad. He roamed the grounds and cloisters and though his black button eyes were cast down on the pages of his breviary, we knew he was really spying on us. At mealtimes those small eyes scoured the tables for any misdemeanour: a laugh, a sneeze, the clatter of a dropped piece of cutlery could bring forth a roar which seemed to shake the very walls, and the little kids trembled, we all trembled, even big Father Stuckey up at the high table, watching Red’s huge meaty fingers tear at the soft insides of a bread roll.

  He didn’t scare me in the same way Etta did. He was in a different category, an angry man, that was all. Etta was something you couldn’t define and I thought this might even be what made him scary. ‘Yeah, the Rector,’ murmured Frankie, smiling a little. ‘Old Red. Yeah, Hay’s scared of him all right.’

  *

  A couple of days later, Father Gorman came up to Frankie as we were coming out from breakfast. He had a message he wanted delivered to the bookbinder’s hut. The hut was out on the other side of the dairy, at least half a mile away. ‘You might be a bit late for class,’ he said, ‘so I’m giving you one of these,’ and he handed Frankie one of the pink slips we called pinkos, that were used for late excuse. ‘Don’t lose it, eh?’

  I kept an eye out for him through the window of my classroom. It looked out onto the courtyard and the cloister, the way Frankie would return. Half an hour into the lesson there was no sign of him. A small boy appeared at the far side of the courtyard, hurrying across it towards the door we used to go up to our rooms. It was Hay Jarrell, and even from a distance you could see that he had a streaming cold. His small face was flushed and his nose was running; he had a drowned look, parched for air, yet sodden. He reached up to the handle of the door, all the time glancing furtively around him because there was a rule that after breakfast you weren’t allowed to go back to your room or dormitory—we weren’t allowed back all day. It
was supposed to teach you foresight, I think, forward planning of your day. It was obvious that Hay had forgotten to bring his hanky; he gave a sneeze so enormous that it bent his small frame double. When he straightened he shook himself like a puppy and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his cassock. Then he reached for the door again, and at that very moment the Rector’s burly figure hurtled from the office on the other side of the courtyard.

  It was clear that something had already made him angry that morning—he was bristling with it, dark in the face, his coarse black hair stiff with electricity. When he spotted Hay by the door he snorted, and his massive chest seemed to swell against the cloth of his soutane. ‘Boy!’

  Hay froze as the Rector charged towards him.

  ‘Boy! What are you doing there?’

  ‘I—I—’

  ‘Were you about to go through that door?’ Red took a step closer and jabbed a finger at Hay’s narrow chest. ‘Were you?’

  Hay shrank back, so the finger was left jabbing at the air.

  ‘Y-yes, Father.’

  ‘Don’t you know the rule? No one, I repeat, no one is allowed into the rooms or dorm during the day!’

  ‘But, but I needed to get a hanky—’

  The Rector reached his great hand towards him, and for a second I thought he was going to pick Hay up by the collar and give him a good shaking. I think we all thought that, because by this time the whole class was watching, even Father Beasely, who’d turned round from the board. Old Blinky, we called him, because he had a sleepy look and once or twice he’d dozed off at his desk, his big head propped on his hand. Now he was wide awake, staring through the window at Hay and the Rector, the chalk trembling in his hand. The window was open, we could hear every word, and a relieved sigh went round us when after all Red’s hand descended harmlessly to his side. ‘No one,’ he roared again, ‘no one is allowed inside the building during the day. This is something you should have learned. Repeat it.’

  Hay goggled up at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Repeat the rule.’

  ‘Um. Um, no one is a-allowed, to—um,’ he paused and then finished in a rush, ‘to go inside during the day.’

  ‘Remember it in future.’

  ‘But I’ve got a c-cold,’ said Hay doggedly. ‘I need my hanky.’

  We watched, amazed. Hay was so small he barely came up to the Rector’s waist. He was like a little holly bush in the shadow of a gigantic oak. Although it was too far away to make out, we all knew the vein would be bulging in the Rector’s temple.

  ‘Please can I go and get my hanky, then?’

  In the ordinary world, at this point, someone would have yelled out, ‘For God’s sake, let the kid go and get his bloody hanky!’ At St Finbar’s, we acted differently. No one said a word, except for Old Blinky, who shook his head sorrowfully and murmured, ‘Oh, Rufus!’ so softly you could barely hear.

  ‘Can I?’ pleaded Hay again. His straw-coloured hair stood up stiffly in the breeze.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ snapped the Rector, and abruptly, as if he’d had enough and any further sight of the small sniffling kid was more than he could bear, he turned sharply and stalked away. Hay stood staring after him, bewildered, as if he simply couldn’t comprehend a world where your nose is running and you’re sneezing and you’re not allowed to go and get your handkerchief.

  A breeze sprang up. Bold shadows danced along the walls. Frankie came running out of the cloister. He saw Hay and went straight up to him; a sudden wind whipped their words away but you could guess what they were saying. We could see Frankie searching in his pockets for a hanky, finding nothing, and then unbuttoning the top of his cassock and pulling out the bottom half of his shirt, grasping the cloth in both hands and tearing off a big square piece of it. And though we couldn’t hear that either we could imagine the sound of it, sudden and shocking and somehow clean. Riii—iip! Like the sound of the flag on the tower snapping in the wind. Hay’s face lit up, first with astonishment and then with glee. He laughed, and Frankie laughed with him, and a moment later Hay was running down the steps to his class, clutching the makeshift hanky. Frankie sauntered off to his own class, hands in his pockets, slowly, untroubled. I think he might even have been whistling. Old Blinky turned back to his notes on the board and we went back to our copying.

  What is it that makes you sense another person is staring at you? Back at my primary school, old Sister Honoria would have said it was your guardian angel. I wasn’t sure that I believed in guardian angels anymore—all I can say is that I felt the gaze upon my skin. It was like cold oil. I looked up and out of the window again and Etta was in the courtyard. He stood exactly in its centre, and his dark sharp shadow stretched out from him like the marker on a sundial. Those strange deep-set eyes were fixed on me, and the gaze was quite different from the one he’d fixed on Frankie down in Shoreham, in which, without actually registering it at the time, I’d sensed a kind of longing. There was no longing in the way he looked at me across the courtyard, simply a chilling and intense dislike, which at first I didn’t recognise. Then I did. It was more than dislike, it was hate—for some reason I couldn’t fathom, Etta hated me and he wanted me to know. I was shocked. I had lived a very sheltered life; no one had hated me before. I tried to think of reasons: did he hate me because he knew I tried to keep Frankie out of those troubles Etta needed for his Book of Little Things? It never occurred to me for a moment that the hatred might spring from jealousy.

  ‘Mr Rowland, are you with us today?’

  I looked round to find Old Blinky standing beside my desk. ‘Ah, you are with us. Then if you could kindly translate for us the first two paragraphs of chapter three?’

  I translated. When I finished, and looked through the window again, Etta was gone. He had such an ease in appearing and disappearing that you wondered if you’d really seen him at all. He was like smoke. Sometimes I thought I smelled a whiff of sulphur in the air.

  11.

  As the weeks passed and there was nothing to remind him and no chance of seeing her, I’d thought Frankie would gradually forget the girl from St Brigid’s. But he didn’t forget. If anything, his preoccupation with her seemed to grow more intense. Almost every night he talked to me about her; he had the most exact memory of that encounter, those few precious moments on the road below the seminary. Every detail seemed to have imprinted itself on his imagination: her hair, her lips, her eyes. To talk about her skin—its softness, the flush of colour on her cheekbones—could make him breathless. It was the greatest disappointment to him that he hadn’t heard her voice, that she hadn’t spoken, only smiled. ‘Though if I had to choose,’ he said, ‘I’d rather have the smile. Did you see it, Tom? I think she liked me. Do you think she liked me or do you think she was just being kind because she felt sorry for me?’

  ‘Sorry for you? Why would she feel sorry for you?’

  ‘Oh, you know. All dressed up in my black crow’s outfit.

  All dressed up and nowhere to go.’

  ‘She liked you.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could sense his pleasure, even through the wall. ‘What do you think her name is? I bet it’s beautiful too—’ And he started going through a list of girls’ names, all the ones he liked most: Teresa and Barbara and Rosalind and Clare …

  He dreamed of her continually. Lying awake, which had become a habit with me, first out of homesickness then from my anxiety about Etta, I’d become familiar with Frankie’s dreams and I could tell when they were about her. Those dreams were full of shifting restlessness and a kind of deep yearning I swear I could feel right through the wall. I knew he was dreaming of making love with her like he’d done with Manda Sutton. Then one night he had the nightmare again, the one he’d had a few days after he’d first arrived. ‘No!’ he was shouting, ‘no, Dad, no!’ It was worse this time—he was crying in big gasping sobs like the kids with whooping cough brought into my father’s surgery, where it seemed with each gasp that they’d nev
er be able to catch their breath again. I went to him. I jumped out of bed and ran out from my room into his without a thought that I was breaking rules. I pushed his door open and the moon gleamed down from that high strip of window like the face of a wicked old man. Frankie was sitting up in bed with his hands clenched on the blanket. I could feel the terror coming off him like heat. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ I whispered, and he stared at me blankly, still half asleep, half in the nightmare.

  I switched on the light.

  ‘I didn’t! I didn’t!’ he shouted.

  ‘It’s me, it’s me, it’s Tom.’ I grasped one of his hands. It was warm and rough, and the suddenness of that contact gave me a kind of shock. I felt as if, in my whole life, I’d never really touched anyone before. I sat down on the bed, still with his hand in mine. He was waking properly now—I could see it in his eyes, like a tide coming in, see him starting to work out where he was and who I was and what I was doing there.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘You were having a nightmare,’ I explained. ‘It sounded bad, so—so I came in.’

  He leaned back against the pillow, though he kept his hand in mine. ‘It was my dad,’ he said.

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘I was dreaming about him. He was angry.’ A little shudder ran through him, I felt it in the bones of his hand.

  ‘It was only a dream.’

  He bit at his bottom lip. He had big square teeth, very white and strong-looking. ‘I know, but he did get angry, Dad. He got angry a lot.’ His face took on that same baffled, stricken expression I’d noticed the time we were coming through the cloisters and he’d told me how his dad used to make them sit quiet when they got home from church while he said the whole mass again.

  ‘He loves us, but,’ he said. He must have seen my uncertainty, right there, because he added, ‘Honest he does! It’s just he gets fed up sometimes. With work, you know, and having so many mouths to feed. And with me being no good. Scum.’