The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

The Finest Hour

'—ucking detention!' Charlie kicked open the double doors angrily and stomped down the corridor. 'You don't go to the Head Master, that isn't how this war works! Gillespie's spine is so weak I could floss with it!'
'I think you're missing a vital sign: Peter submitted,' said Iggy, hurrying to keep up with Charlie's rage-fuelled strides. 'His seeking help outside Baldwin's Bec has shown that he has accepted defeat.'
With his chin propped on the heel of his hand like a sculptured scholar, Charlie had been half-listening to the History Master drone like a combine harvester about William Ewart Gladstone when Peter chose to strike. As his eyes fixated on the master's hand resting on the chalkboard duster that he threw at the heads of boys who looked like their minds might be elsewhere, the praepostor slid infectiously into the room like influenza into the lungs. His eyes immediately swivelled around the room until they found Charlie.
Opening a villainous grin on his face as he bore into him, the Rat King asked, 'Is Chance in this division?' Followed by, 'He's on the bill to see Head Master after chambers.'
Charlie snapped back in his chair like an elastic band. 'You're joking, aren't you?'
When Gillespie left the room, History Master murmured, 'What a thoroughly unremarkable boy.'
'I don't want to hear any ifs or buts, Chance,' the Head Master had said when he confronted the boy later, hands resting on his globe-like belly as he sat behind his desk and smoked a pipe. Susceptible to schoolboy humour, the Head Master often made a friend of the student due to his willingness to address concerns advisably, unlikeliness to execute the severest form of punishment available, and willingness to encourage repartees, debates, and candid discussions without judgement. Undoubtedly, some whimsy was still left in his wardrobe since he was prone to punishing students for irrational reasons—being boring, smelling unpleasantly, supporting sports teams he liked the least—with unconventional methods. 'Cheer up, Charlie. You can either write out Latin hexameters with Quinn and Buckley, or you can help Carrozza mop the sweat and swears off the floors of the gymnasium hall for an hour. Between you and me, I'm offering you the lightest form of punishment because Gillespie is as charming as an inanimate centenarian. It's your decision.'
'Perhaps she was right,' Charlie grunted, stepping outside to continue his mourner's march towards Whiteley Hall like a man destined for the gallows. 'Maybe schools are sinister lairs that are only good for one thing: pumping people with manufactured personalities until they forget what it's like to be a boy or girl once it has stolen every bit of wildness inside them and severed their connection with the bucolics. Maybe it is merely a factory product that matriculates to university before being shipped off into employment. As time goes on, the individual sees less and less of their untamed self until they're nothing more than a pristine statesman who acts like they've never encountered their feral fragments at all, and nor can they ever recover them.'
'You do talk quite a bit of bollocks sometimes,' Iggy replied, lighting a cigarette for them to share.
'Says the boy who once said that moths are just sad butterflies,' Charlie remarked. 'I was paraphrasing Seraphina Rose.'
'Actually'—Iggy paused—'in hindsight, she might just be on to something.' He slapped the other boy's arm excitedly. 'But this domestic chore is a blessing in disguise: you'll finally be able to observe Frankie Carrozza in his natural habitat!'
'I doubt he would take lightly to being compared to an animal,' Charlie replied.
'You've been given a glorious and gorgeous gift that most people will only dream of: the opportunity to see what he's like by the eye rather than the ear. To hear his words, study his movements, understand his characteristics, learn how he thinks and what he thinks about. The idea that they think this is a punishment is almost laughable.'
As they stepped inside Whiteley Hall, Charlie lowered his voice. 'Well, I'm glad that you seem to think so, you agitating spear. I'm the one who has to stretch a conversation with him by making boring statements about the weather, the newspaper headlines, or our progress in sports. I've never been in his company for a full minute, never mind sixty of them. What if I'm boring? God forbid, what if he's boring? Oh, the intimidating dread. I feel like I'm about to be introduced to a member of the British royal family—though, mind you, I'd much rather meet with one of them right now and accidentally get shot from an assassination attempt made against one of them than stand between the cross hairs of Carrozza.'
'Pull yourself together, Chance. Some boys would eat their own grandmothers raw to have five prosperous minutes with Frankie, never mind what they'd do for an entire hour.' Iggy flicked a strand of invisible hair from his forehead and sniffed indignantly. 'Make the most of it, but don't make a mess of it, or I swear I'll gut you like a fish afterwards and flay your entire body to wear the skin for an autumnal scarf.'
Recalling every "encounter" he had ever had with Francesco, Charlie's mouth gaped like a secret passage. His face paled, a complexion that was already silvery, until he looked almost translucent. 'I've accidentally perpetuated a false image of myself each time he's been near; he must think I'm some anxious, mumbling, bumbling, fumbling weirdo. What—what if he doesn't speak to me because of it? Why should he feel the need to? It's not like we're friends—or even acquaintances, for that matter. It's detention, not dinner and the theatre. Maybe we'll be separated by a substantial amount of distance so we won't have to initiate anything beyond pleasantries and formalities.' He started to breath heavily. 'Oh dear Jesus! Christ on a bike! Good Lord, I hate Peter Gillespie beyond words. Crikey! Blimey! Fuc—'
'Do carry on, Chance,' Iggy muttered, buttoning his sleeves and removing his gloves. 'I'm rather looking forward to the moment I get to slap some sense back into you.'
'I'll make a run for it,' he hissed. 'I don't care if they beat me black and blue for it so long as I don't have to go through with this. Oh, why didn't I choose to write out Virgil instead? Yes, I'll scarper. I'll scamper—'
'You'll do no such thing.' Iggy shoved Charlie into the hall, causing him to slide on his back until he skidded to a squeaky stop and lay sprawled on the smooth, glossy floors as the doors swung shut behind him with a soft thud.
I hate Ignatius Perkins, too, Charlie vowed, adding him to his list of marked men.
'Not to be a spoilsport, but might I make a suggestion?' a husky voice asked, as gravelly and as smooth as a sip of old whiskey. 'From my experience, you might find it a lot more comfortable to walk in the doors rather than barrel roll through them.'
Charlie tilted his head backwards to see the upside-down image of Frankie Carrozza, looking back down at him amusedly as he wiped his hands clean on a cloth.
'I went to pull, but apparently you're meant to push,' Charlie said. 'But thanks for that, otherwise, I'd be trying them sideways next time.'
'Do you often have difficulty with inanimate objects?' he asked.
'You'd be unpleasantly unsurprised.'
'Temperamental pair, to be fair.' Frankie glanced towards the set of doors on the other side of Charlie's feet. 'I suspect it might have something to do with the constant bit of pushing and pulling they undergo on a daily basis—enough to make anyone frightfully vengeful.'
The exchange ended with two genuine smiles footnoting one another's retort, and Charlie suppressed the desire to bite into his rosy cheeks, as appetising as a bowl of rhubarb and custard. Realising how silly he must look lying on the floor and looking backwards, he turned over to stand. He felt a firm grip on either side of his ribcage and suddenly he was upright.
'There we go!' Frankie beamed, beating dust off Charlie's shoulders and sides. 'That's the right way up, isn't it?'
He touched me! One half of his brain giggled gleefully, still feeling the ghost of his warm hands. Oh shut up, you, the other half sniped.
'You've just missed the Head Master; he was in here mere moments before you arrived to check if you had yet, but then he had to rush off to a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury,' Frankie said, leading him towards the buckets and mops propped together in the middle of the room. 'Don't worry, I'm to let him know you made an appearance tomorrow so that you don't get into any more trouble. I would have done so anyway even if you hadn't bothered to show up.'
The handles of our mops are criss-crossing like two roosting robins, the insufferable area of his conscious marvelled. Once again, the sensible side answered, You are worse than an aneurysm.
'We've an hour to leave this place spick and span, old fellow,' Frankie continued, using a mop handle as a microphone. As he watched Charlie strip down to his trousers and shirt like he had done, he asked him, 'What's your name?'
'Charlie,' he answered as casually as he could. Whilst he hung the rest of his uniform on the bars of the climbing apparatuses racked against the wall, he tried to remember that he was being punished rather than blessed, pretending he felt slightly disgruntled over losing the hour. 'Charlie Chance.'
'Exquisite alliteration: Charlie Chance.' He slowly sounded out each syllable, getting a feel for them in his mouth before letting them go. 'The perfect name for a hotshot journalist, a private investigator, or an adult film star, perhaps—though a classy one at that, of course, one from Pink Narcissus or an Andy Warhol flick.' The bells of Heaven rang from his laugh to welcome his soul home, and Charlie laughed, too. 'I'm—'
'There's really no need,' Chance interjected. 'Would you honestly believe me if I pretended not to know who you are?'
Taken aback, a curious crease crumpled between his eyes as he smiled again and shrugged. 'Well, a pleasure to actually meet you, Charlie. And now that I have, let's pretend that I've included all the other pleasantries and formalities that are usually involved, old fellow, because they consume too much time better spent participating in more entertaining things available. We'll not break the ice until it shatters apart underneath, but imagine that it has been melting all along for a very long time, indeed.'
'Alright, I'll accept that.' Charlie grinned as they shook hands, equally amused and bemused. 'And the pleasure is all mine.'
'Well, we'll just have to see about that,' Frankie remarked. 'Pleased, all the same.'
'Same,' he replied.
After they'd bad-mouthed their masters and swapped morsels of gossip like smugglers exchanging pirated goods on the bay, Frankie spotted his souvenirs (a Venetian mask keyring and a Murano glass pendant), and asked, 'So, you were in an Italian over summer?'
'No, Italy—oh.' He burst into a chortle.
'I was there visiting relatives for a stretch on Sardinia, too,' Carrozza said, looking chuffed. 'What are you in doing time for, anyway? Tell me, are you a delinquent? A rogue of wrongdoing? A reckless juggernaut? A rising reprobate? A riotous rebel hoping to usurp the courtyard crown so as to reign kingly above the foolery as the utmost revelrous reveller of the Eton empire? Pray tell if you are a forthcoming miscreant and it will go no further than me. I'm already in here for life.'
Chuckling, Charlie replied, 'I'm in Peter Gillespie's cross hairs.'
'I thought that was you. The Rat King is a snivelling git,' he responded. Pointing at him, both of his hands clutched the tip of the mop and he rested his chin on top. 'Nevertheless, I should probably keep my eye on you.'
'What did you get done for?'
'Bucks and Cahir were given lines, but they slapped my wrists with detention when we got caught rifling through a master's office drawers, unwittingly finding rather unspeakable items that exceeded your typical bottle of port.' He did not elaborate any further.
Whilst Charlie set to mopping to make up for the time they'd lost to talking, Frankie slid in his tube socks along the squeaky floors, his mop untouched. His shirt was yanked out of his trousers to spill untidily over his belt. Ink blotched the collar and cuffs, bleeding all the stories he could tell. His buttons were as loose as his morals, and Charlie quickly looked away shamefully each time the hem snapped up to wink wheaten skin.
Surely it would be just as much a sin not to look. Charlie twisted the mop to drain it and sighed, leaning and sliding against the handle as he watched Carrozza ice-skate throughout the hall. Chastising the delirious, desirous component of his brain, the wise fragment remarked, Why must you do this to us?
'Are you still slaving away over those floors?' Carrozza called, unwrapping a belt from a hook on the wall. 'The Eton College Chronicle should be whistleblowing this sweatshop wide open!'
'Well, I was under the impression that we were both here in the nick to be sentenced to work.' Smiling, Charlie frowned. 'Clearly, I was wrong.'
'Clearly.' Carrozza pulled the apparatus free from the wall and dragged it out to open it in the middle of the gymnasium hall: the rectangular frame was shaped like a wooden goalpost with a row of thick ropes dangling between.
Wrenching out the sopping mop, Charlie asked him, 'What are you doing?'
'Well, if you were as attentive as you were obedient, you'd have noticed that not one single member of staff has come to check in on us in over half an hour, and I don't think they intend to. They've forgotten about us altogether, I'd wager. To them, you and I might as well be out in Luxmoore's garden. Trust me, I'm a reliable source: I've attended more detentions than I have schooldays.' Grinning, Frankie pressed the metal clamps down at either end of the equipment with his foot. 'Surely you're not going to let a fellow play with himself all by himself? Unchecked, I can be a bit ... maniacal.'
'What about the floors? Won't they notice the floors aren't clean?'
'Of course! The floors, Watson, the floors! Christ, how could I forget the floors? I've been well and truly foiled.' Frankie gasped dramatically, clutching the sides of his head in sheer panic before pressing tattooed fingers to his lips. 'I will not take this lying down for the culpable Moriarty to make of me a common wench to warm the bedsheets with. Never fear, Sherlock Holmes always knows a trick to get him out of the nick!' The manic maverick simply tipped his bucket over with a toe, undulating the soapy contents across a wide patch silkily. Wringing his hands together, Frankie continued, 'Exemplary, wouldn't you say? I tell you what, just trust me. These floors haven't been polished since Bunny Breckinridge graced them, so they'll never know the difference when they're soaked in sweat by this time tomorrow.'
'Trust you?' Charlie rolled up his sleeves, unsure if the boy was truculent or indolent. 'You're incorrigible. I'll be in here for life, too, and all before the evening is out.'
'Correction, thickhead: I'm encouraging,' the boy replied, ticking the air with a slash of his forefinger. 'The late Head Master William Horman once mentioned in the Vulgaria: manners maketh man. Technically, he never specified whether they had to be good ones.'
He lifted one of the thick ropes hanging limp from the wooden structure like gnarled branches. Fondling the swollen knot at the bottom, he faced his cellmate and raised his other hand out to him. 'C'mere to me, Charlie.'
Once the words exited Frankie Carrozza's wit-laced lips, a cocktail of sensations flushed through Charlie, a plethora of emotions and urges coaxed from an innocent command—though the boy was clearly nothing of the sort, making mischief at his best. His imagination took over, surrealism powerful enough to break the confinements of actuality and drip daydreams into existence as richly as wet paint. He envisioned Frankie in little more than his favourite white t-shirt and a pair of briefs woven out of dove feathers, his hand extended to him in yearning rather than the casual flick of two fingers towards him. Obscured by a heavenly glow streaming in from the windows behind as heavily as a curtain to bask him in celestial ambiance, the outlines of angel wings protruded from Frankie's shoulders, several vanes scorched black with sin. Feeble wind stirred his mahogany curls, the headband scarf now no longer black to match his school trousers, but white to compliment his wings, an abundance of rose petals, snow-white feathers, and black quills pouring around either side of him to dance across his abdomen, his shoulders, his clavicles, his outstretched forearm, smooth flesh the colour of milky tea, and showering Charlie until they tangled in his hair and fleeted through his fingers. A simple gold crown sat crookedly on Frankie's head to coronate him as the rightful king and heir of Eton and Windsor. Eton often avowed that Frankie Carrozza was dangerous; but of course he was dangerous: he was a teenaged boy, after all.
Frankie cocked his head to the side, and asked, 'Where'd you go just now?'
'You don't want to know,' Charlie replied, looking at his feet briefly.
'Be coy all you want, but mealy-mouthed is the one thing you don't need to be around me.' Frankie handed his rope's neighbour to Charlie, who took ahold of one of the knots and looked to it queerly before imploring the taller boy for further instructions. Tongue clenched between his teeth, he joked, 'Come fly away with me!'
Clutching firmly to his rope, Frankie bounded beneath the contraption and belted a resounding 'Whoop!' as he flew up on the other side like Tarzan swinging on a jungle vine. Charlie followed him, the ground vanishing from under his feet. As they swung like pendulums, their silhouettes interrupted the dusty chutes of buttery sunlight spearing in through the windows. Words melted away into giddy yelps and wolfish howls. In all of his countless daydreams, Charlie would never have dreamt that Carrozza housed a childlike soul. Having said that, he suspected that it was only a fragment that he beheld, one of many shards pieced together—the untamed, the wayward, the wise, the rebel, and the roadless wanderer among many more, perhaps. Maybe it wasn't that the boy was strangely reserved in a way behind all of his unapologetic words and antics, but that he may be exposing to Charlie parts of him that would entice a boy of his disposition by his own talented demassification. It seemed likely that Frankie could easily deduce what it was that an individual wanted or needed to see, and, contrary to his cousin, concealed rather than incorporated many of his qualities. Holding tight to the remaining chapters behind his back, Frankie held out to the reader a handful of pages ripped from his book. Like a child cupping a secret in their hands and offering a peek, the essence of him seemed only inches out of reach from Charlie's fingertips.
The bell rang to take the wind from underneath their wings mid-flight and banish them to the ground again. Red-faced and sweaty, their chests heaved as they panted. Leaning against their ropes, they grinned through roving eyes.
'Freemen,' Frankie said breathily.
'I thought you said you always had a trick in your back pocket to get you out of the nick,' Charlie voiced, a cheek pressed to the swaying rope.
'I do.'
'Then how'd you end up in here?'
'It seems there is a bite of something as sour as spite underneath that tongue as sweet as respite.' Frankie's own tongue rested on the corner of his lip as he measured Charlie. 'What if I was to say that it was serendipity? Perhaps we were meant to meet? Perhaps divine intervention wanted—or needed us to swing on these ropes today? Oh, come all ye angels with your clingstone flesh to save us from the dire, like Sodom and Gommorah, before we're consumed entirely by brimstone and fire.' Frankie winked, bent against his rope and siphoning air into his lungs. 'Providence. Just perhaps.'
Charlie snorted doubtfully. 'Two lads clowning around on ropes might be just as much a purported miracle in the eyes of God as the angel Gabriel visiting Our Lady in Nazareth?'
'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.' Frankie smirked. 'Just so you know, like Him, I never mean anything unless it's meant to happen.'
'So, what you're saying is that you intended to get caught? Is that really what you're telling me?'
'Precisely. I sat in that chair in the office with my feet on his desk, one of his cigars in my mouth, flanked by Bucks and Quinn, and the dirty drawer in question propped open, waiting for the master to return—who will remain anonymous as I'm not a secret-monger. When he did arrive, he instantly recognised that I had leverage over him; he knew that he couldn't possibly keep my most trusty hip flask that he'd confiscated the day before.' He wetted his lips, sucking on them until they glistened sanguine; Charlie's hold on the rope tightened considerably. 'However, when he had returned, it wasn't alone: Bernard Sinclair followed him inside to demand he reassessed an old essay. Although he would have had every right to have me expelled, he was also well aware that my hand was holding a naked flame close to a fuse—if I was to go, I'd be taking him with me; I'd have flicked the pin off the grenade and blew us both to bits. Now I have my hip flash back and a lesser sentence, one that wouldn't have been given in the first place hadn't that glob of bile appeared behind him to spoil it all. The master had to make some sort of an example of me, and it had to be weak to keep me sweet, so I suggested this—after all, I've a reputation as a bad egg of Eton to uphold. An hour of monkeying about Whiteley Hall didn't sound much like a chore to me.'
'I don't think I could keep up with you.'
'Very few can.'
'You're a curious one, Francesco Carrozza.'
'That'—his finger tapped Charlie's mouth—'is the most accurate sentence I've heard all year. And it's Frankie to you.'
They gathered their belongings and prepared to bid adieu. As Frankie walked off to retrieve his book on Foucault from the windowsill, the voice of Seraphina Rose filled his head: Leave them with a memory to remember you by, sweetie—after all, we're all just memories in the end, so be sure to make it your best one yet. Charlie slowly put his tailcoat back on, mindful of the fact that it was highly unlikely that their time together had altered anything significantly between the boys, only brushing their lives together as briefly as the queen of the night, a night-blooming cereus that shrivelled the next day, before disengaging to return to their own orbits after keyhole glimpses. Nonetheless, neither time nor death could steal back that monumental hour; it would be with him and his until the end of him.
The boys dawdled several feet from one another outside Whiteley Hall. Wordless, they stared and smiled for a moment as Frankie rocked on the balls of his feet, hands in his pockets and a whistle on his lips. Eventually, they turned to leave in separate directions—Chance back to halls, and Carrozza towards Windsor. From afar, when he looked back, Frankie saluted him farewell, his expression an odd combination of a tight-lipped smile and a frown, as though finding something comical and quizzical that he'd previously overlooked. On his walk back to Baldwin's Bec, Charlie's hatred for Gillespie declined somewhat into something that was too overwhelmed with dislike to be gratitude, but it probably hadn't lessened enough to stop him from joining the boys who planned to retaliate against the Rat King by hiding trout and salmon in his study.
'Well?' Iggy demanded, rolling up his issue of Vogue and patting the space beside him on the bench with it. 'How was it?'
Snapping the cigarette from Iggy's hand, Charlie took a long drag of the fag and exhaled. 'Perhaps, thus far, one of the finest hours of my life.'