My Lovely Frankie Read online

  The word shocked me. I couldn’t even say it. ‘You’re not!’

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled and his hand slipped out of mine as he settled his head down onto the pillow. There was a button hanging loose on his pyjama top and I couldn’t take my eyes off it: I wanted to snatch it, to keep. It was the most ordinary sort of button, plain white, with four tiny holes where the cotton went through. I couldn’t understand why I wanted it so much. He closed his eyes and I got up from the bed and went towards the door. When I was halfway there he called out, ‘Tom!’

  I turned. ‘Yeah?’

  He was sitting up again. ‘Manda Sutton and me, what we did, you know, what I told you about that time, when Dad caught us … I’ve been thinking and thinking, and it wasn’t bad, not like everyone makes out. Really it wasn’t.’ He was looking at me almost beseechingly, and somehow I knew that he wasn’t only talking about Manda Sutton, but about the girl down in Shoreham, those dreams he had of her.

  ‘It was lovely,’ he said. ‘With Manda. Truly it was. Do you believe me?’

  I thought of the beautiful dusk falling and Frankie singing in it, and the little green stars and the cherry trees, and I tried not to think of Manda Sutton and especially not the dark-haired girl because I knew he was thinking of doing the same thing with her, and thinking how lovely that would be. I said, ‘Yes, I believe you.’

  ‘Say it then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say it was lovely.’

  ‘It was lovely.’ I switched off the light and his voice came to me through the dark. ‘So how can something that’s so lovely be bad? How come it’s supposed to be this great big sin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, Frankie.’

  Outside in the corridor there was a perfect quiet. It was a still moony night and there wasn’t a sound from the small kids upstairs and I hoped they were asleep and hadn’t heard any sound from Frankie’s nightmare. I’d just reached my door when I heard a creak on the stairs. At once I thought of Etta. I froze, my hand on the doorknob, my fingers unable to turn it. He’d have seen the light in Frankie’s room, he must have—or else he’d been prowling round the corridors and heard the sound of the nightmare and our doors opening and closing. My heart thudded—any second I expected to see that strange domed head rising up the stairs. I don’t know how long I stood there, my gaze fixed on the spot where he would appear. No one came, and after what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes, I crept down to the landing and peered over the banisters. The stairs were empty all the way down to the next floor and in the dim light of the single overhead lamp the polished wood of the next floor looked like a sheet of gold.

  Back in my room I began to wonder if I’d imagined that creaking sound, if it was in my head, part of my fear that Etta would get Frankie thrown out and I’d never see him again. I lay on my bed and for the first time I thought about why the idea of losing Frankie frightened me so much, when I’d only known him such a little while. I told myself it was because I was lonely and missing my home, though that didn’t really seem enough. Then I thought it was because Frankie was special and if I lost him I’d never find anyone so special again, for me. That seemed right.

  Suddenly I remembered Denny and Joseph back home. There was this night when my father was called out to the army camp, and I’d gone with him. It was a bad night, drizzling and bitterly cold. ‘You stay in the car,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’ He was long, though, so long that I went to find him. The cold iron huts had narrow corridors and small poky rooms where doors stood open on cot beds pushed together in a jumble of blankets and newspapers and clothes, little crowded kitchens dark as dens. A small girl leaning against a doorway kicked at me as I went past. ‘What do you want?’ Someone was crying somewhere.

  My father was in the room with the crying. A woman lay on a bed and he was bandaging her arm. She had a black eye and there was a red mark on her shoulder the size of a big fist. A man slumped in a corner, neighbours stood peering round the door. ‘Here’s your boy, Doc,’ one of them said, and my father glanced up for a second but he didn’t say anything. He finished bandaging the woman’s arm and said to her gently, ‘I’d like you to come to the surgery tomorrow, Mrs Lightman.’ She didn’t answer and he said to one of the neighbours, ‘Mrs Carter, do you think you could come to the surgery with Mrs Lightman?’ Mrs Carter nodded and my father smiled at them, and then we walked out of the place; and halfway across that muddy stinking field, he said to me, ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you poverty is holy.’ Then he strode on again, so fast I had to run to keep up with him.

  The light rain was still falling as we drove away down Lascelles Avenue and into China Road. Denny and Joseph lived in China Road, in a small cottage with a huge old peppercorn tree in the middle of the front yard. Most of the houses in the street were dark already, but the window of Den and Joseph’s living room was fairly ablaze with light, the curtains undrawn, and you could see them seated at the table playing a board game. Denny made a move and then Joseph made one and then Den clapped his hand over Joseph’s and they both started laughing. You could feel their happiness, it seemed to fill the room and pour out through the windows towards us; all at once I felt warm and my father was smiling. ‘See?’ he said. ‘It’s the love that counts. Always.’

  *

  In my room at St Finbar’s, I pulled the blanket close around me. Next door Frankie had fallen dreamlessly asleep. I could hear his breathing, soft and slow and even; it reminded me of the sound of the sea on still days, shusha, shusha, shusha. It lulled me—I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been there.

  12.

  Frankie found a photograph in one of the big leather-bound collections of old St Finbar’s magazines that were kept in the shelves at the back of the library. It showed a group of St Finbar’s boys sitting on the grass in front of the old dairy. The dairy wasn’t so old back then; though the photograph was in faded black-and-white you could see the boards were freshly painted, they had a kind of gleam. It must have been a special day because at one side of the photograph you could see the end of a trestle table with a white cloth spread, and a big glass jug with glasses stacked beside it. Behind them in the distance the flag was flying from the tower.

  In the list of names beneath the photograph there were two which were familiar: Rufus Bowles and Lionel Beasely, the Rector and Old Blinky. Lionel Beasely wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses and a jaunty smile; it was a kind face, and it was easy to imagine Old Blinky being that sort of child. Rufus Bowles was the big surprise: the Rector was as small and skinny as Hay Jarrell. Without the pouches of flesh his black button eyes were larger, softer—he looked like the kind of kid who might write poetry at night. ‘See his hand,’ said Frankie, and I looked and saw how the thin kid was holding his hand out to the camera and there was a small white butterfly perched on the back of it.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ said Frankie.

  He borrowed more of the old journals from the library and pored over the photographs. At night I heard the pages turning as he searched for names we knew: he found Father Nolan from his own town and Father Max, the principal of my old school. He found Father James: a long-faced, dreamy boy.

  He caught up with me on the stairs one night after evening prayers. I knew his footsteps by then, the special sound of them; I knew his light touch on my arm. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed. He was carrying another journal beneath his arm. We stood on the landing beside Tim Vesey’s window. It was dark and the headland was dotted with lights, and I thought how Tim knew which light was home. Frankie rested the book on the window ledge and turned the pages. He’d found Father Gorman. Young Patrick Gorman was holding a cup won by the senior debating team; he was beaming and his hair was mussed and the buttons of his cassock were done up crookedly, like Frankie’s often were. ‘See, he looks just like us!’ He stared down at the picture for a long time and once he put a hand up to his face and felt the bones as if to test they were
still solid. Kids hurried past us up the stairs, occasionally casting curious glances in our direction. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’d better go.’

  After lights out that night he tapped on the wall and brought up the subject again—how they looked like us in those pictures. ‘Did you see Father Gorman! And think of him now!’

  ‘Everyone gets old,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, it’s not that, it’s not old, I mean. They’ve got a look. Father Stuckey’s got it, and he’s not old. Not really old. It’s something else, it’s—they get a look about them like they’re not quite the real thing.’

  I thought of Father James on those evenings he came to dinner at our place. You could see how he tried to fit in, to be like us, only he could never quite get it right. Even those sly adoring glances he gave my mother had a strangely made-up quality, as if he was holding his breath, thinking to himself, ‘I’m doing this, now.’

  There was a fabric around in those days called artsilk. My mother had a dress made from it, my favourite of all her dresses, pale blue forget-me-nots on a dark blue background. I thought it made her look beautiful; when she put it on her hair seemed darker, cloudier. My father liked it too. ‘Oh, that old artsilk thing!’ she’d say whenever we pestered her to wear it, and for a long time, with that blue dress in mind, I thought the word ‘artsilk’ meant the material was a kind of work of art, special and beautiful. Then one day she told me the word was simply a shortened way of saying artificial silk, and artsilk wasn’t real silk, though it looked and felt like it. ‘They’re artsilk,’ I said to Frankie. ‘Our teachers. They look like real people, but they’re really manufactured.’

  I thought he’d laugh, I’d meant it jokingly—instead he said very seriously, ‘I’m not going to let that happen to me, I’m not ever going to get that look.’

  ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘No, it’s true. And you can start looking like that when you’re young, too. Tom?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do I still look okay?’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t like it. She wouldn’t like going around with a boy who looked like he wasn’t the real thing.’

  He had begun to talk like this recently—as if he really knew the girl down in Shoreham, as if they were going out together. Though I knew it was only a sort of game—the habit of mind you might get from thinking about a person continually, so that they became a kind of imaginary companion in your private world—it was disturbing. I think we all played games: Tim Vesey at his window, watching the lights of his house go out, whispering goodnight to the people up there, pretending they could hear. Or the way, crossing the paddock to the football field, I would sometimes stand still on the springy grass, imagining I was standing on that old brown doormat back home, screwing my eyes shut tight, playing the game that when I opened them I’d actually be there. Frankie imagining he had a beautiful girlfriend down in the town. At the heart of all these games was love: for Tim and me it was the love we’d known at home, Frankie looked for his love elsewhere.

  *

  Mirrors were in short supply at St Finbar’s. There were a few small ones in the bathroom for the boys who shaved, though if you were as tall as Frankie it was difficult to see the upper half of your face. And the glass was spotted with mildew, so your skin had a leprous look. He took to seeking his reflection in the dark windows of the refectory, and in puddles of rain, even in the shiny distorting hollow of his porridge spoon. One evening after night prayers I found him in the broad corridor below our stairway. It was lined with portraits of former rectors and church dignitaries. He was standing before a full-size portrait of the Archbishop, whose dark robes framed behind the glass formed a perfect mirror.

  ‘Look! I can see myself!’ he said delightedly. ‘The whole of myself! And I’m still all right.’

  ‘I told you.’

  Behind his glass the Archbishop gazed out at him sternly. Frankie leaned up close and stretched his arms along the portly image. ‘Look! I’m hugging the Archbishop, see!’ He stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on the dim painted lips. ‘Mwaa! Look! I’m kissing him now!’

  The corridor where we stood gave onto a narrower passageway, and from there I now heard footsteps approaching. Soft ones. ‘Someone’s coming,’ I whispered. Frankie wasn’t bothered. Steps behind him, the idea of some unseen person watching—these things never seemed to trouble him, he trusted people. He was unwary, and I wished with all my heart that I could have been like that. But I wasn’t, I knew it, and standing there in the corridor I vowed I would look out for him so he never became anxious and fearful like me.

  ‘Mwaa!’ He stepped back from the portrait and blew the Archbishop another kiss just as the unseen person emerged from the passageway. It was Father James. He was wearing his black clerical overcoat and his shoes gleamed and he looked happy. A set of car keys dangled from his hand—he was going out, and I thought with a pang how this might be one of those times when he visited my parents, one of those nights when he arrived very late, and he and my father sat talking till morning.

  ‘Hello Frankie, hello Tom,’ he said. ‘On your way upstairs?’

  ‘Just going,’ said Frankie cheerfully. ‘We’re saying goodnight to the Archbishop.’

  Father James laughed. The laugh died abruptly and he was frowning past us to the pool of shadows at the bottom of the stairs. I looked round. Etta was standing there. All the time he’d been standing there, all the time when Frankie had been peering at his reflection and kissing the painted Archbishop behind his glass—acts which would fill a whole page of Etta’s Book of Little Things.

  ‘Brian Cooley,’ said Father James softly. For a moment the name didn’t register, even though John Rushall had told me that it was Etta’s real one. Frankie had never heard of it. ‘Brian Cooley?’ he said, and then he laughed delightedly, ‘Brian Cooley. He’s Brian Cooley!’

  The reiteration of his true name had a strange effect on Etta. I can’t describe it except to say that some movement on his face reminded me of a sudden ripple on a still dark pool: something’s there beneath the water, only nothing breaks the surface, nothing comes. I sensed a hidden fury and thought of the story, Rumpelstiltskin, where the manikin was so angry when the miller’s daughter called out his true name that he tore himself in two.

  ‘Father James?’ Etta stepped out of the shadows.

  ‘Brian?’

  Etta pointed at Frankie. ‘This boy—’

  ‘Frankie,’ said Father James.

  ‘Francis Maguire,’ said Etta, and there was a hint of wetness in his voice as he spoke Frankie’s name. ‘Francis Maguire was being disrespectful.’

  ‘Disrespectful?’

  ‘He was making fun of the Archbishop’s portrait.’

  ‘Was he now?’

  ‘He—kissed it.’

  ‘Kissed it!’ said Father James. ‘Well, that must have been a surprise for His Eminence.’ He swayed a little and it struck me suddenly that he might be drunk. Only a little bit though.

  ‘And he was looking at himself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was looking at his reflection in the glass, Father. Admiring himself.’ Etta rose a little on his toes, then went down on his heels again, as if to emphasise the seriousness of the crime. ‘That’s vanity, Father. That’s self love.’

  ‘I don’t love myself!’ protested Frankie. ‘I don’t, do I, Tom?’

  I said quickly, ‘No, you don’t,’ and Father James looked from one of us to the other.

  Etta ignored us. He concentrated his attention on Father James. ‘Aquinas says self love is the cause of every sin.’

  Thomas Aquinas was the theologian we studied most intensively at St Finbar’s. He was called ‘The Angelic Doctor’. There was a portrait of him hanging in the library; his round chubby face had an absorbed, dreamy expression—Frankie said he didn’t look like the real thing.

  ‘Aquinas, Brian?’ said Father James. ‘And didn’t Aquinas say, after
he saw that vision a little while before he died, that everything he’d written was straw in the wind compared to what he’d seen?’

  Etta’s face went blank. It was smooth though. Hiding things.

  ‘Did he really have a vision, Father?’ asked Frankie eagerly.

  He loved hearing about visions and miracles.

  Father James nodded.

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘No one knows exactly.’

  ‘He saw Heaven,’ exclaimed Frankie, and he stretched out his arms to all of us. ‘I bet he saw Heaven!’

  Frankie’s religion was different from mine. He believed in Heaven quite literally, as if it was another lovely world out past the stars. He believed in angels and resurrected saints in golden robes and haloes: he pictured them walking with Jesus and Mary in fields where the lion lay down with the lamb. He believed they saw everything we did, heard every word we spoke, knew every thought in our minds. These glorious beings were the people he thought he’d offended by making love to Manda Sutton, the ones to whom he whispered, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ in the night. Mystical Rose, Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, House of Gold—whenever I hear that litany, I think of Frankie, because that’s how he believed, and it seemed strange when you thought of that hot little desert town he came from, the frightening family life he sometimes described to me.

  He caught hold of the sleeve of Father James’ clerical coat and gave it a tug. ‘He did see Heaven, didn’t he?’

  Father James smiled at him. ‘I think perhaps he did. Now off you go upstairs, both of you; the bell’s about to ring.’

  ‘But Father James,’ protested Etta. ‘Father, this boy—’ he pointed, ‘Francis Maguire—’ Again I heard that slick wet sound.

  ‘And you too, Brian,’ said Father James coolly, as if Etta was no more important than Frankie and me, only another student he was sending off to bed. ‘You too may go.’

  He and Etta stared at each other. It was a long stare, a long silent moment which seemed to stretch on and on so you thought something extraordinary would happen at the end of it. Only it never did. With a sudden click of his heels Etta turned and walked away down the corridor. Frankie and I went up the stairs. At the top I looked back, Father James was still standing at the door; he might have been watching to make sure that Etta didn’t return. He waved to us and pulled open the door. It was raining outside. ‘Ah, rain,’ he said, and splashed out through the puddles.