My Lovely Frankie

by Judith Clarke

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, Tom.’ Gently, he took it from me and tossed it onto the bed. He looked into my face. It was the very last time I’d see him. Though of course I didn’t know that.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for being here, Tom.’

  I went back to my room and kicked my boots off and lay down on the bed. Frankie got into his bed too, I heard the sounds of it: the boots falling, the rustle of the cassock coming off, the creak of the bed, the shift of his poor body as he turned towards our wall. He must have been so tired.

  ‘Hay’s mum and dad will come and get him now, I bet,’ he whispered. I’d almost forgotten about poor Hay. Frankie hadn’t. ‘They’ll come and take him home,’ he went on. ‘And he’ll be all right too—they won’t think he’s a bum, they won’t think he’s useless just because he didn’t want to stay here. He’ll be someone one day, Hay Jarrell will. Someone really good, I bet. You could see how they loved him … ’

  He was less than a metre away from me through that thin partition. When I put my hand against it I could almost feel his warmth. I pictured him lying there, the fingers of one hand smoothing at his blanket, like Hay’s mum had stroked her son’s back through the stuff of his cassock, up and down and up and down. I couldn’t stand it that he thought he had no one to love him like that. I longed to say—the words were there ready on my tongue—‘I love you, Frankie.’ Only I didn’t, he wasn’t like me and I didn’t know how he’d take it, so I swallowed the words back down.

  I didn’t ever say them.

  20.

  If. From now on, everything is ‘if’.

  Miri hates it when I go on about if. ‘Oh don’t, Tom!’ she pleads, and if I keep on with it she puts her hands over her ears.

  ‘Don’t!’

  So I don’t, not with Miri. I keep if to myself.

  If I’d told Frankie I loved him that night, would it have made a difference to what happened?

  Once I was talking to an old friend about our seminary days. He had entered early, at twelve. ‘I was so lonely, so very lonely,’ he told me, ‘that when this older boy came up to me and whispered, “I love you,” I let him make love to me, even though I wasn’t gay. It was the word, I think—the simple sound of it, in that place—’

  If I’d told Frankie I loved him he might have done this too—made love to me because he desperately needed love that night, and Bella was a daydream, and he liked me even though he wasn’t gay. He came from a more pragmatic, less sheltered world than I; he’d have given love to me if he thought I wanted it. He was always a kind boy. And then he wouldn’t have gone out that night.

  I never told him because I was too afraid. I fell asleep and when I woke, perhaps only twenty minutes later, I could tell that he’d gone.

  I didn’t go after him, I guessed he might want to be by himself on this last night before his confinement to the courtyard was known and enforced—he’d want to be out in the great spaces of the headland, walking off his humiliation at the hands of the Rector, wandering his lovely, lovely world. Only then I began to think of Etta, of his anger and frustration that Frankie had escaped expulsion again—those blades and spikes and jangles that Frankie had sensed in the corridor outside the Rector’s study. Blades and spikes and jangles: the words reminded me how right at the beginning I’d dreaded that if I spoke Etta’s name to Frankie it would set off some dreadful mechanism which could never be stopped in time. Now it seemed I’d been right. And Etta knew Frankie, he’d most certainly guess that he’d go out wandering tonight; he’d go after him.

  If. If I’d gone straight away I might have reached Frankie in time, while he was still on the hillside, before he’d gone, as he must have done, to wait for the sunrise from the ledge above the sea.

  If, as I hurried along the path beside the teachers’ garden, that same brilliant sickle moon hadn’t swept out from behind a cloud and picked out the tap, the one Frankie had drunk from the evening Father James had called me to his study. It glinted like a malicious secret against the dark bushes and I stopped—I stopped because a memory came sweeping over me, a great gritty wave that squeezed the breath right from my chest. I saw Frankie stooping over that tap, his blond hair and red sweater luminous in that fading light, and then, when he’d gone, Etta coming out from his hiding place and putting his lips where Frankie’s sweet lips had been. I saw his rapturous face, his finger pressed to his lips to seal in the taste of Frankie.

  I realised, finally. Etta was in love with Frankie: everything was as simple as that. It had been simple all along. The watching, the spying, that invisible line I’d sensed drawn between them down in Shoreham: that was love, Etta’s love, burning itself through the air. Everything inside me seemed to writhe, each muscle and organ, each nerve, each tiny cell. That Etta could feel as I did! It horrified me—that he might lie awake and think about Frankie, that he might long to touch that buttery golden hair, to take Frankie’s hand and kiss those long brown fingers, one by one—

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand…

  Plunging from the path I pushed my way into the bushes and found the kind of dark, secret refuge where a child might hide. And there I crouched, clutching at a handful of some spicy smelling plant, crushing its leaves in my hot fingers. Sometimes at night I’d press my burning forehead up against the cold surface of the wall between us as if it was the warm roundness of Frankie’s shoulder that I leaned into, the smoothness of his skin I kissed. The thought that Etta might also do something like that was like poison rushing through my blood. He couldn’t! He couldn’t!

  And suddenly I knew he couldn’t. At least, I thought I knew. I thought: if Etta loved Frankie like I did, then he would never want him sent away, he would want to be near him forever. I didn’t see the rest of it. It never occurred to me that Etta might see his love for Frankie as depraved and vile and dangerous, a demon to be cast out. I didn’t understand, not for a long, long time.

  I crept out of my refuge and made my way towards the hillside.

  If. If I’d gone a little earlier, instead of continuing to sit there in a kind of trance, paralysed, still crushing those small soft leaves in my hand—because of course, when I reached the top of the hill, Frankie wasn’t there. He had been, I could see that, the sickle moon showed me a small scattering of his love letters on the ground. Not many, no more than a handful, and I guessed he’d taken them from his pockets for comfort, ‘to look at’, and then, for some reason, simply let them fall. I snatched them up and crammed them into my pockets. Then I began calling him; distraught as I was, I didn’t care who heard. There was a strange tumbling feeling inside my skull, as if everything in there was turning, falling, rearranging itself.

  ‘Frankie!’ I called. ‘Frankie!’—stumbling towards the gap in the wall, peering down at St Brigid’s. Tonight the outside light had been switched on, illuminating the entry and a big spiky holly bush beside the porch. Outside the gates a single street lamp shone on the empty road. There was a wind now, a tricky giddy little wind, and I watched it chase a small piece of paper playfully down the road, lifting it a little, dropping it down again. It was a neat piece of paper, perfectly square, and I knew immediately it was one of Frankie’s love letters. My eyes darted back to the holly bush beside the porch, I’d half registered something white caught on the thorny leaves. Now I saw it was another love letter, held fast. When the wind blew it waved and fluttered like a small white hand.

  For a moment I imagined Frankie climbing over those tall gates, ‘posting’ the letter on the thorny branch for Bella to find. I dismissed the idea at once. There was a strain of sound common sense in Frankie; he’d know Bella wouldn’t be the one to find the letter, he’d know he’d get her into trouble. The wind had taken it there. I heard footsteps, Frankie coming up the hill behind me. Still peering at the letter, trying to work out how we could get in to St Brigid’s and retrieve it, I called back over my shoulder, ‘There’s one of your love letters down th
ere, it’s stuck in this bush next to the door. They’ll find it.’

  He didn’t answer. I turned round and there was Etta.

  He looked different. That was the only thing I registered in that first moment of utter frozen shock: how he looked different. I didn’t take in properly what that difference was, except that he looked wrong. It was only later I worked out that it lay in an air of disarray: he had always been so immaculate, now his normally shiny boots were caked with grey muddy sand and there were smears of it along the hem of his cassock. The cassock itself was crumpled and damp-looking, and there was a button missing from the top, the second one down. It had been torn off, you could see the small clean rip in the fabric where it had been. And he was holding another of Frankie’s letters in his hand. Without speaking, he stepped forward to the gap in the wall and looked down at the school, and I had no doubt he saw the white scrap of paper fluttering from the holly tree and knew at once what it was, because a little hiss escaped his lips, though he still said nothing to me.

  From the road below I heard the sound of a car and Etta must have heard it too, though he gave no sign of it. A taxi was coming towards St Brigid’s. It stopped outside the gates and after a minute a teacher got out from the passenger side and stood on the footpath, searching in the pocket of her habit for a key. The taxi drove off and she unlocked the gates and went inside, closing them behind her. She walked up the path to the porch and knocked on the door. She didn’t notice the piece of white paper in the bush beside her until a little gust of wind set it fluttering, and then she picked it from the bush like you’d pick a flower. She saw the writing and bent her head to read.

  The front door was opened by the grey-haired woman Frankie and I had seen through the lighted window the night before. The teacher held the note out to her; she glanced at it, said something, and then they both turned and looked up towards St Finbar’s, as if they knew it had come from there. I thought of the brief message on the note: Bella, my beautiful, beautiful Bella, I love you—Frankie Maguire.

  ‘They’ll be on the phone to the Rector first thing in the morning,’ murmured Etta.

  I turned towards him. His deep-set eyes seemed larger, closer to the surface; they had a strange, shocked expression. I saw that he hadn’t really been speaking to me, he seemed barely to notice me—he was talking to himself. ‘He’d have been out before lunchtime anyway,’ he went on in that same strange sleepwalker’s voice. ‘He’d have been gone. Gone. I needn’t have done anything. I needn’t have.’ The reedy voice tailed away and I heard a small dry rasping sound; his tiny hands were clutched round his forearms, wringing and writhing, the movements a person might make washing grease off his arms after some messy little job. He saw me watching and his hands fell slowly to his sides.

  I couldn’t understand him. I couldn’t understand why he was talking in the past tense, as if Frankie had already gone from St Finbar’s. I couldn’t understand why he wanted Frankie gone, anyway. Not if he loved him.

  I said so.

  ‘I don’t know why you want him sent away.’

  He didn’t reply, though I knew he’d heard me because his face twitched and his throat moved slightly as if he was trying to swallow something that wouldn’t go down. I was on the verge of tears myself, and what I said next was really about my loss as much as his. ‘If he gets chucked out you’ll never see him again.’

  He screamed at me. The sound was so shocking, so raw and terrible, that it took me a moment to work out his words. ‘Don’t say that! I don’t want to see him! Why do you think I want to see him? I don’t! I don’t!’ Then he swung away from me and rushed off down the hill.

  21.

  ‘You were so lucky with your parents,’ Miri said to me one time. ‘So lucky with Uncle David and Aunty Clare.’

  She was right, of course. In a time when for most people homosexuality was seen as either farcical or morally degraded, I grew up thinking there was nothing really wrong with being gay. I knew there were many who didn’t share my parents’ views—the only time I ever saw my father really angry was the weekend when the windows of Joseph and Denny’s bookshop were smashed, and Perverts, Out! scrawled in thick red paint across the doors. I knew that being gay was going to be hard but I also believed what my parents had taught me, that we were people who could also love, and it was the love that counted.

  Etta would have grown up differently. I only have to picture his parents: the tall ascetic man and the pale woman who came to visit him at St Finbar’s on that freezing winter’s day, and I know that in his family homosexuality would never have been mentioned, simply because it was unmentionable. His parents would have agreed with St Thomas Aquinas when he wrote that homosexuality was ‘a special kind of deformity’.

  Etta himself would have agreed. The attraction he felt for Frankie would have seemed vile to him, like the workings of an evil spirit inside his body. ‘He hates himself,’ Frankie had said with his sure instinct, and of course he was right. Etta would hate himself and he would fear any beautiful boy for whom he felt that stirring, which in other people would have been the beginnings of love. ‘Etta gets these downs on people,’ John Rushall had told me, ‘and then he wants to get them out, away from here.’ Etta’s ambitions meant that he had to be seen to be pure.

  ‘Imagine that!’ Miri said to me. ‘Imagine thinking you were deformed inside.’ I remember she shivered, and added with one of those sidelong glances, ‘You’d do anything to hide it.

  Anything.’

  Of course, I understood none of this that night I met Etta on the hillside. None of it. I went back to the seminary expecting to find Frankie in his room, and when he wasn’t there, I simply thought he was still wandering his lovely, lovely world. I would leave him in peace on this last night of freedom. I thought he was safe. I knew Etta was back, when I’d passed the prefects’ rooms I’d seen the sliver of light shining from beneath his blind. I wasn’t thinking properly; already the cloudiness was forming at the bottom of my mind. I went to Frankie’s room and sat down at his desk, took a few sheets of paper from the notebooks he’d used for his love letters and wrote out my parents’ address for him, and a note he could give to them. ‘Just in case,’ I told myself. In case Etta was right and the nuns from St Brigid’s rang in the morning, and Frankie was ‘out by lunchtime’. Would he be? I didn’t know, I felt I didn’t know anything, and perhaps after all Etta didn’t know anything either. After all, the nuns hadn’t told on Frankie that long-ago day when he’d walked across the road to Bella down in Shoreham. My head ached. I reached for another sheet of paper and wrote a note for Frankie: If you ever need to, you can come and live with us—I scribbled out the ‘us’ and put ‘them’, and then I changed my mind and crossed out ‘them’ and put ‘us’ again, and then I sat there looking at the small word for a long time, wondering whether it would put him off or not. Finally I left it there, folded the notes and went to the wardrobe, where I slipped them into the pockets of his spare trousers, the ones he would most likely wear if he had to leave.

  As I came out of his room one of the small kids upstairs began to cry. It sounded louder out there in the corridor, and it went on and on, the same old aching sound. Back in sixth class, Sister Honoria had once given us a composition: ‘What would Jesus think if he came to our school?’ Now, my ears full of that desolate crying, I wondered what Jesus would think if he came to St Finbar’s and I had a pretty good idea it would be like the story of the money changers in the temple: Jesus would rage through St Finbar’s, knocking over the long tables in the refectory, tearing open the big steel fridges and the locked cupboards in the kitchen, spilling their contents on the floor, barging into the Rector’s study and strewing his papers round—

  Upstairs the little kid was still crying and suddenly another voice, young like his, but newly tough and merciless, growled out savagely, ‘Shut up!’ The little kid went silent at once and I ran to the landing and shouted up the stairs, ‘You shut up! You shut up!’ My voice echoed along the
corridor, all the kids on our floor would have heard it, just like they’d have heard the little kid crying and the savage one telling him to shut up, silencing him. No one came. No one did anything. It was like Frankie said that time on the hill when I told him about Bri Tobin’s outburst down at the handball courts: ‘They’re scared.’ And Bri was right when he’d said, ‘You feel like you’re getting this hard place, this little black hole inside you and some day you might even want to hurt people and—and you won’t even know you do.’

  And perhaps I was getting like that because all at once the only thing I wanted was to go and look at the sea—not those big waves that came crashing up against the cliffs on stormy nights. I wanted the gentle sea Frankie and I had watched together that afternoon down in Shoreham. I wanted that calm, unending movement that he’d loved so much, that reminds you of the word ‘forever’ and brings a kind of peace.

  I went into my room and took my coat from the wardrobe—like Hay Jarrell’s mum, my own mother had bought it a size too large in the hopes that I would grow. It almost covered my cassock and down in Shoreham no one would recognise me as a boy from St Finbar’s.

  Out in the courtyard the slit of light was still shining beneath Etta’s blind. A sudden urgent curiosity drew me to that window, it felt like need. I had to see Etta on his own, in the place where he felt hidden, safe. I crossed the courtyard towards that narrow beam, stooped down and put my eye to the gap between the sill and the blind. I don’t know quite what I expected to see, and my heart beat so loudly I thought he might hear it through the glass.