My Lovely Frankie

by Judith Clarke

  *

  ‘What do you think St Thomas saw?’ Frankie asked me that night. ‘Do you think he saw Heaven?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He was silent. I heard him shifting in his bed and imagined him lying there looking up at the ceiling, the soft buttery hair on the pillow, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘I think that would be the best thing,’ he said. ‘To see Heaven.’

  I didn’t know what happened to me then—that sudden harsh surge of rage that swept through me so that I wanted to shout at him, ‘Do you? Do you? The best thing? Better than fucking Manda Sutton? Better than fucking that girl from St Brigid’s?’

  Of course I said nothing like this. I was priggish about words like ‘fuck’ and I hated people shouting. I don’t think I would have been able to shout at Frankie, anyway, I wouldn’t have got past the first couple of words. But I wanted to. Why did I feel so angry? So violent? Was I jealous of those girls? Jealous of him wanting them, dreaming of them? Or was it something else? Was I, without knowing it, angry because I was beginning to feel that his childlike beliefs could pin him, still living, to a collector’s board? At St Finbar’s, things could build up inside you and you didn’t know they were building. Even now I’m not sure what caused that anger, only that from this time on tides of anger and confusion would come rushing through my heart and then race out again, leaving me flat and sad.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be the best thing? To see Heaven?’

  Upstairs a small kid whimpered in the dormitory. The best thing, I thought savagely, would be if there wasn’t any Heaven or any God and St Finbar’s closed and that kid could go home to his mum and dad again. I didn’t say any of that, either. I could hardly believe it was in my mind. ‘Yes,’ I said dully. ‘Yes, it would be the best thing.’

  13.

  One afternoon at sport I couldn’t find Frankie anywhere. I’d seen him across the refectory at lunchtime, afterwards I’d missed him in the crowd hurrying down towards the changing sheds. I wandered over to a group waiting for a turn at the handball court and asked if they’d seen him. No one had. They were talking about the holidays, what it would be like when the year ended and we’d be back home for two whole months, amongst ordinary people in the ordinary world. ‘Funny,’ said Joey Gertler. ‘It’s going to feel really funny.’

  ‘Funny,’ exclaimed Bri Tobin, and the word came out so roughly, almost savagely, that we all looked round. Bri was a big, strong boy who came from the same part of the city as I did, the sprawling suburbs over beyond the railway line. He reminded me of Jimmy Blewitt, the boy who’d come up to me at school the day Father Boyle had announced my vocation and said, ‘Tom, it’s forever.’ Like he knew what ‘forever’ was.

  ‘It’s this place that’s “funny”,’ Bri went on, still in that same savage voice. He jabbed a finger at the ground on which we stood. ‘It’s like they want us to think we’re the only good ones. God’s Specials, different from everyone else.’

  ‘But we are different,’ someone said. One person, I didn’t see who it was. Everyone else was silent, listening, waiting to hear what else Bri was going to say. Normally he was a quiet boy; I think that’s why we listened so intently, because now, as his voice speeded up, we sensed he couldn’t stop talking even if he’d wanted to. ‘You wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t remember your little sister’s name. How’s that for being different, eh? How’s that for being one of “God’s Specials”? A couple of years more and if your mum went blind you wouldn’t care because you wouldn’t know how to care anymore. Not for them! Not for ordinary people!’ His breath caught, he was almost sobbing, and I saw Joey Gertler put his hand up to his mouth as if to hold back some kind of answering sob. ‘What would some ordinary lady going blind matter, anyway?’ Bri went on. ‘She’s not important, she’s an extern. She’s not one of us.’ He thumped a fist into his palm. ‘I don’t care what they say, thinking like that, it’s wrong. It’s bad. You feel like you’re getting this little black hole inside you and it’s getting bigger and bigger and some day you might even want to hurt people. And—and you won’t even know you do.’

  There were gasps. A couple of kids started talking in rushy voices about football teams, trying to drown him out, to pretend. Others inched away. I wished Frankie had been there. I went up to Bri. ‘You’re right.’ I said.

  But he didn’t want to talk anymore. His face had gone blotchy. ‘No, sorry,’ he blurted. ‘Look, sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that.’ He turned and walked off towards the changing shed, his fist rubbing at his eyes.

  Two years later, at the beginning of his senior year, Bri Tobin left St Finbar’s. His place was vacant in the chapel and the refectory, and that was all we knew. Nothing was ever said officially, though the usual rumours sprang up: that his parents had thrown him out too, that he’d been seen up the Cross, drunk and chucking his guts out in the gutter. Someone had seen him begging with the old soldiers in the dark little arcade that ran between Wynyard and Hunter Street in those days. None of it was true. Bri went home and his parents were glad to have him there. He got a job in the post office and studied for his matriculation at night school; he went on to university and became a psychologist, married and had a family. The little black hole inside him closed over and he never became the kind of person who wanted to hurt people.

  That afternoon after Bri strode off I looked around again for Frankie. There was still no sign of him and he should have been easy to spot: St Finbar’s had no uniform for sport and most of us wore shorts and the sweaters from our old schools. They were sombre colours mostly—grey and navy and dark green—and Frankie’s sweater stood out because it was bright red. All the same it was a while before I finally saw him, a flash of colour against the scrub, way up on the hillside near the wall where I’d walked with my parents that day back in summer. I hurried round the back of the handball courts and along the track that skirted the vegetable gardens. There was no one around to see me, or at least I didn’t see anyone, though there were plenty of places to hide.

  The wall had crumbled further since I’d last seen it. Stones lay in the grass and there was a big gap where you could stand and look down to the road without being seen from below. From there you could see straight over the walls into the garden of St Brigid’s, its smooth green lawns like water in the bottom of a cup. It was mid-afternoon of a sunny day and the girls were out for their break, strolling in pairs along the gravel paths, scattered in little laughing groups beneath the big trees. I saw Frankie’s girl at once. She had that same intense vitality Frankie had; your eyes were drawn to her. She was sitting on the grass with a friend and Frankie was watching her. He was taking in every detail: the way she laughed, throwing her head back to show her white throat, the way she was wearing her hair today, braided in one long thick plait and tied with a navy ribbon; and the way her face grew serious as she bent forward to listen to her friend, it made her seem so real. Frankie was like a thirsty person drinking from a glass; I saw his throat move as he swallowed. When she lifted a lock of the other girl’s hair and wound it round her finger, I could see a kind of shiver move all the way down his spine.

  ‘Frankie?’

  He looked round. He didn’t seem surprised to see me; perhaps he’d heard someone coming but that hadn’t been enough to make him take his eyes from the girl. Now, for a moment, he did. ‘Her name’s Bella!’ he said, and his eyes were shining.

  I had never told him about Etta seeing him that day down in Shoreham; now without any warning, it came bursting out of me. It was those shining eyes, I think, and the way he’d said her name, with a kind of tender reverence, as if she was one of those holy creatures in his clear blue heaven. ‘You’d better be careful,’ I said, ‘Etta’s been watching you.’

  He looked bewildered. ‘Etta? You mean the prefect?’

  ‘Yes.’ I said the name again, tempting fate. ‘Etta.’ Nothing happened after all, no dreadful mechanism came
grinding into life. A little breeze sprang up from nowhere, that was all, and Frankie shrugged and turned back to studying Bella down there in the garden. The navy ribbon was slipping down her braid and his eyes fastened on it. I could see he wanted that ribbon like I’d wanted the loose button on his pyjama shirt.

  ‘He was watching you that afternoon down in Shoreham,’ I went on. ‘You know, when we were coming back from the dentist’s, when you saw—Bella.’

  He turned back to me. ‘He was there?’

  ‘Near that chemist’s shop. He was watching you.’ He didn’t ask me why I hadn’t told him before and I was glad, because out in the sunny afternoon the idea that if I said Etta’s name to him it would be like pressing the button on some dreadful mechanism sounded barmy, though inside my head it still sounded right. ‘John Rushall told me Etta gets these downs on people,’ I went on. ‘And then he tries to get them thrown out.’

  ‘Thrown out? How?’

  ‘He’s got this notebook. He sort of collects all the times people get in trouble, even if it’s little things like being late, and—’

  ‘Or coming up here to look at girls,’ he said, smiling. You could see he didn’t really take it seriously. ‘Or sneaking out at night.’

  ‘You go out at night?’ The minute he said it, certain things fell into place: those nights I’d wake and couldn’t hear his breathing and there’d be a sense of emptiness from his room; the way I hardly ever saw him in the early mornings; and how, a couple of times, going down the stairs to morning prayers I’d met him coming up, already dressed, an air about him as if he’d been somewhere. I glanced down at the girl in the St Brigid’s garden. Did he meet her? Were those happy dreams not dreams at all, but memories? My voice rushed, it ran. ‘Do you go and meet her?’

  He looked down at the girl and sighed. ‘Oh, if I could. Only I can’t—I promised, didn’t I?’

  ‘Promised?’

  ‘In the church that time, back home. You know, before I came here. I made this—promise. So now, I just, well—mostly I just walk. I’ve got to—I wake up and I get so restless, I’ve got to go out and walk. There’s lots of places—’ He waved his arms. ‘It’s a lovely world. Sometimes I go to that place you told me about, that cliff above the sea, where you went with your mum and dad—’

  ‘You go there?’ I thought of the narrow pitted shelf, the murky little pools, my mother saying, It’s like a picture of the end.

  He grinned at me. ‘Don’t look like that. I like it there, it’s great. When you sit on the ledge and look out, there’s so much space, all that sea and sky, you can watch the sun come up—’

  He’d get caught. That cliff top was out of bounds. I imagined Etta following him, creeping through that close green tunnel, only a little way behind.

  He read my mind. ‘Look, Etta won’t see me. He’s not God. Not even the devil. He’s nothing—a kid who hates himself, that’s all.’

  ‘Hates himself?’ Startled, I thought of Etta’s immaculate appearance; the spotless cassock, the shining boots, the clean perfection of his tiny fingernails. ‘How? How does he hate himself?’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘He just does. You can see it. There’s lots of people like that—wrong. Wrong people, no matter how good they look from outside.’ For a second, his face had that queer stricken expression it got when he spoke of his father.

  A bell sounded from inside the convent and the girls began to drift towards the building. Bella and her friend got up from the grass and brushed down their skirts, then arm in arm they walked towards the door. The ribbon fell from Bella’s plait and when he saw it Frankie drew in a breath, and I could see that the ribbon falling onto the grass and Bella stooping to pick it up were more important to him than anything I’d said about Etta. The girls went inside and the garden was empty, yet we still stayed there beside the wall. I told him what Bri Tobin had said, and how people had walked away from him as if he had some disease that was catching, and he nodded and said, ‘They’re scared.’

  Down on the road a man and woman came walking, their voices a low close murmur. The woman laughed suddenly, and the man smiled at her and caught her hand.

  ‘They’re so lucky,’ sighed Frankie. ‘To be in love, and it’s just a happy, ordinary thing.’ When he spoke the word ‘love’, you heard a kind of gravity in it, and at the same time an amazing lightness, so that the word seemed to spring free and fly into the air. You could almost see it, like a beautiful balloon you wanted to run after.

  Down in the seminary, our own bell rang. It was the bell for study, and after that there’d be the bell for tea, and then rosary, and then more study, and fifteen minutes’ walk around the courtyard, and then night prayers.

  We set off down the hill.

  14.

  Winter came on. The wind howled, it flung itself against the walls, shrieking at the windows like a tribe of demons struggling to get in. The rain swept in great freezing sheets across the courtyard, icy puddles filled the hollows of the paving stones. The sea roared. One morning Frankie sneaked off to look at it from his secret perch on that narrow ledge above the sea. It was a little before dawn; in the grey light he would have seen the high swollen waves crash in, and the spray would have soared so high it drenched him through. He would have loved it. I met him coming up the stairs as the rest of us were hurrying down to chapel, and I went with him to his room and waited in the doorway while he brushed that sticky grey sand from his cassock and gathered up his books for classes. ‘It was wonderful!’ he told me. His face had a kind of raw happiness all over it, his hair stood in stiff salty spikes. ‘I’m going to go there again!’ I don’t think he’d have felt the wind and rain, and if he did it would have been part of it all, another small glory of the lovely, lovely world. Standing there listening to him, it struck me that Etta, though he’d have no time for the loveliness of the world, would share this kind of invulnerability—bent on his own purposes, he’d hardly notice wet and cold. And again I imagined him creeping after Frankie along that grey sandy path through the blackberries and lantana—oblivious, intent.

  I still couldn’t properly understand that intent. Etta’s ambition was clear enough to me, but I couldn’t understand why Frankie should be in his way. I didn’t see why he should ‘get a down’ on Frankie, as John Rushall had warned. ‘He hates himself,’ Frankie had said, and I didn’t understand this either. Not then, anyway.

  Oh, it was cold that winter! The stuff of our cassocks, so heavy and sweaty in those first weeks at the drag end of summer, now seemed thin as paper, the wind cut straight through. We had chilblains and cold sores, and coughing filled the classrooms and the chapel and the rooms and dormitories at night. A boy fainted in choir practice and was borne away by two prefects without the slightest break in our singing, the beautiful harmonies of Palestrina’s O Domine Jesu Christie rising uninterrupted to the great rafters, and I felt we were no more than simple instruments of skin and flesh and bone.

  The weather brought a fresh wave of homesickness to the small boys upstairs. As the weeks stretched to months they’d settled down as routines took over and their homes seemed further and further away. Now and again you’d hear a whimper in the middle of the night when one of them woke from a bad dream or a bad memory of the day, but most of them appeared to sleep soundly. Now winter made them cry again. I suppose the new weather brought fresh memories of home: rain running down the windows of a familiar room, wet umbrellas dripping in the hall, mothers in dressing gowns filling hot water bottles from kettles on stoves. I’d learned myself how memories could make you ache all over, make you feel like shouting, ‘I want to be there!’

  The sound of those small boys crying was terrible. I think it was the way they choked it off—how they knew they weren’t supposed to cry, especially at night, in the middle of the Great Silence, because they were special people; they belonged to God, they should not long for earthly comforts, for their earthly mums and dads, for home. So they’d begin crying, then they’d remember and break off, afra
id, and in the silence that followed you could hear a kind of welling: the anguished longing to cry and cry like any ordinary kid might do if he was homesick and lonely and bewildered. If you ask me the sound I remember most clearly from St Finbar’s, then it’s not the sound of the wind raving or the sea roaring or the bells that ruled our lives, it’s that crying of the small kids in the dormitory upstairs. When I first heard it at the beginning of the year I’d expected someone would go up and calm them down, someone like John Rushall, perhaps, or even Father Stuckey. That didn’t happen and as time passed I realised that, like the rule about not going back upstairs after breakfast, it was part of our training, our formation: for us there was no use crying because no one would ever come to comfort us. Like soldiers, we were being taught to have no pity for ourselves, and even then the edge of it struck me: that if you had no pity on yourself, how could you have it for other people, ever?

  One night of bitter cold, the crying from upstairs was so loud you could hear it above the shrieking and the rattling of the wind. Frankie and I lay listening—it was impossible to sleep. We didn’t talk; he always went quiet when the kids were crying, though I could hear his body shifting restlessly on his bed. Then a child cried out suddenly, ‘Mummy! Oh Mummy!’ and then, remembering sharply where he was and what he was supposed to be, he changed it quickly to, ‘Mary! Oh Mary!’ A boy with a deeper voice was sobbing wordlessly.