The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

In Flagrante Delicto

'Beautiful,' Charlie whispered.
'Yes,' Frankie agreed. After he had stared at him for a moment without speaking, he asked, 'And your parents, what do they want you to be?'
'Whatever my heart desires.'
'Siblings?'
'Inexistent. It's just me.'
'Ah, you must be terribly spoiled then; very few times have I heard of parents allowing their child to follow the whims of their mercurial hearts.'
'Not exactly.' Charlie shrugged. 'I suppose they supply me with whatever it is I require and more, but fail to administer affection properly.'
Frankie's mouth formed into a perfect circle. 'I'm sorry to hear, old fellow.'
'Don't be.' Touched by his concern, Charlie quickly added, 'Honestly, it's fine. More oft than not, everyone is somewhat fond of their creation, and automatically imprint their own unique version of love upon it. Against their wishes, I believe, my parents accomplished what society expected of them: they produced a child to mark their marriage. Don't misunderstand me: it isn't that they dislike or regret me at all, it's just that I was never intended for either of their lifestyles, and only something that was needed rather than wanted. To never have a child pitter-pattering around the house, what would the neighbours say? Although silently glad of one another's ongoing existence, we never get involved in each other's lives. We sit at the table to have breakfast and talk sometimes, but never really say anything beyond the surface. I think we've forgotten how to along the way. It's as though we're an advertisement made to look like a family to sell it from afar, but when the lights go out, when the cues end, when the roles are unnecessary, we depart the stage through separate wings. It doesn't bother me much, as I've become accustomed to it now.'
'Which might be the tragic thing about it,' said Frankie, offering him a cigarette.
Charlie lit it and drew in deep. 'Aside from supplying me with sustenance and an education, I don't particularly believe they knew what else to do with me once I began to speak. They're not sentimental folk. Mind you, they enjoy retelling the story of my first word to friends at dinner parties—to brag, to relate, or to drown out stories of other children that they're sick and tired of hearing about? I don't know exactly. But a rather obstreperous owl had moved into the tree outside my nursery window and hooted loudly every single night, and that is how "who" became my first word. I believe their guidance could only extend so far, and so when I excelled that, when I needed to learn from them about things beyond common capabilities, they only truly knew how to keep me alive.'
'There is something very sad about that.' Frankie lit his own cigarette.
    'What about you?' Charlie shrugged his shoulders, averting his eyes as he took another long sip. 'Any siblings?'
Frankie took a deep gulp and smacked his lips. Once he'd set the tumblr aside, he said, 'One or two.'
'What are Mr and Mrs Carrozza like?'
'Painfully overbearing, and so we revolt.
'"We"?'
'Marigold, my older sister. Margo is currently surfing the second-wave feminism. Although a certified bohemian Buddhist, she's currently studying Theology, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion under the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. She once wanted to run off to become a stewardess, but she's let that dream fly away with every departing aircraft since. It's only recently that my mother is finally proud enough to allow her to attend her soirées, galas, and garden parties as she's less likely to cause a scene with the naturally rebellious flare she'd inherited. Last I heard, she was surfing somewhere in Asia to protest against dolphin drive hunting.'
'What do you want to do once you've left Eton?' Glancing towards the map, Charlie gestured to it with his tumbler. 'Travel, I see.'
'With all my heart,' he answered gruffly, smoke still held in his breast as he passed the spliff to Charlie. 'I long to see the world. I want to meet funny characters at funnier times, eat strange food in stranger places, and make merrier memories than the merriest ones I've made. And as I'm leaving, and this gloomy old island slips away from beneath my toes, I'll be listening to "Come Sail Away" by Styx, and the words will know me as well as I know them when I set off to become one of them—one of those adventurous sort. I plan to see it all, where nobody has ever seen me. I want to see young dawns, swim old seas, and mark every road with my footprint—just me, a rucksack on my back, the ancient stars above, and the old open road below. See, the world is a vast book to read, and England is but a chapter.'
As Charlie's eyes travelled across the world via multicoloured threads, he whispered, 'It would be something, wouldn't it?'
'My itinerary broadens every day: I'll cross the Scottish Highlands. I'll breathe in the west coast of Ireland. I'll swim the Cornish seas. I'll wander the French vinyards. I'll float in the fjords of Norway. I'll run green Swedish fields. I'll walk the forests of Finland. I'll set sail on the Baltic Sea. I'll brave a Russian winter. I'll visit the Italian village that bore my family. I'll light Hungarian lanterns. I'll feel the Spanish sunshine on my face. I'll conquer the Great Wall of China. I'll walk the road that leads to Rome. And I'll answer the call of the Californian coastline.' Frankie sucked in deep on the spliff, eyes alit with dromomania. Voice deepened by holding smoke in his lungs, he muttered, 'Then next: Argentina, Morocco, Australia, Venezuela. I'll consider wherever—everywhere! Just have it be anywhere but here.'
'It sounds like quite the odyssey.' Charlie sighed.
In the silence that followed, Frankie watched him for a long moment, his eyes squinted and his lips stretched thin to form a wonderfully wistful smile, looking at him as though he didn't quite believe what he'd just heard and found it comical, all the whilst mulling over an equation.
'It sounds like you long for it, too,' Carrozza finally said. 'So come with me, then.'
Swaying drunkenly, Charlie's head snapped back. 'Come again?'
'You're getting ahead of yourself.' The tip of his tongue pierced through the teeth of a cheeky grin. 'To me, it sounds like a passion we share. To me, it sounded like a request you wanted to hear.'
'I—I was misconstrued.'
'Then, by all means'—he offered him the floor by sweeping his hand through the space between them—'construe.'
'It sounds heavenly, but I cannot steal your dreams from you.'
'Quite the contrary, I've been looking for a partner, someone to share in adventure with.' Frankie confessed. 'In saying that, when I go off on this epic journey, come along with me. You and I and the great beyond. Next stop: anywhere and everywhere.'
Charlie's heart and eyes lit with drunken possibilities, enthusiasm stirring in them both that had been inspired by the alcohol intake and drowned doubts of a promise that may be dead before dawn, a charge igniting in them both that might force them to take off on the run together that very night. 'If you insist. If you're absolutely sure.'
'I insist. I'm absolutely sure. I'm never sure why in the beginning, but I'm always sure of who: those who fascinate me. Splendid! That's that sorted, so let's drink to it!' Frankie clapped, then clinked his tumbler against Charlie's to toast the dream and seal the swear. 'It's very decent of you. You'll be happy to know that this means you won't suddenly find yourself waking up in Krakow one day against your will. Furthermore, it'll give you something to write about when you help me figure a way out of those misadventures full of nasty characters and mad charades that I apparently tend to stumble into every summer. Adventures that serve to aggrandise the Frankish dynasty. Now, promise—just to be sure.'
'Promise,' Charlie vowed, no matter the morn. After a moment, he said, 'They do say an awful lot of exaggerated—yet, extraordinary—things about you, Frankie Carrozza, the emperor of an Eton empire as grand as the Frankish dynasty.'
'Chance, you have a choice: you could spend the night with me telling you ostensible and rodomontading tales of days bygone, ones about copulating with spies and immortal boys, or we could write our very own rather interesting story together ourselves.'
When the fire shrunk to hot coals, Charlie took his jumper from the fireguard and put it back on. As he soared skyward into surreality on the back of illicit substances, his cheeks flushed with warmth and mirth, he crossed to Frankie's bed and began to inspect it. Without giving it much thought, he followed the frame to the headboard, and then dropped down. Just as intoxicated and as curious, he became aware of Frankie watching him as he slid halfway under it. He was scanning the boards underneath when he felt strong hands trail him out from under the bed again by the hips. Carrozza towered over him, swamping him with his shadow like a handsome gargoyle.
'What are you doing?' he demanded amusedly.
'I expected notches on your bedpost like a cat's scratching post,' he answered mid-laughter, 'but it's immaculate!'
'You idiot!' Frankie sniggered, causing Charlie to laugh harder. When a full minute had passed, his grin died very slowly once his eyes intensified. Deliberation returned to his face again, as though he was wrestling with a troubling decision. One hand still rested on Charlie's hip, whilst the other clutched the side of the bed to steady his awkward crouch. When he used it to lift The House at Pooh Corner off the bedspread, he asked, 'Mightn't you be a little too old for this book?'
Much too faraway to feel shame, Charlie replied, 'How so, when it's written with words much, much older than you or I? It isn't only photographs that deliver you to memories of days bygone. To tell you the truth, when I do reread old parables from childhood, I find that there's a rather bittersweet, melancholic, and nostalgic essence to them that I both crave for remembrance and hate when it darkens me so. Such as the likes found in that book. You see, one of the final chapters ends bathed in a beautiful sunset on the last day of summer on a Sunday—or, rather, so I believe, to the best of my knowledge. As they potter about doing nothing, Christopher Robin tells Pooh that he is leaving the Hundred Acre Wood for good, to go off to school in the coming morn—or so I believe that that is where he's bound for. Rather delicately, he explains to his friend that he mightn't ever return again because ... well, quite terribly and tragically, because he is growing up. And poor Christopher says, "Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." And so Pooh promises, but I'll forever wonder whatever became of Christopher Robin? What did he go off and do with his life? Was he happy, as happy as he was as a boy? And did he ever see those dear old friends of his again? It saddens me so to never know what happens beyond the final chapter. Alas, all stories have a last page bound in a back cover that we're all fated to greet.'
'You say that like they're coffins.'
'Perhaps, Frankie, in a way they are.'
'That is very macabre thinking.'
'Why must it be so, when the contents once made us feel so very happy if only for just a moment?' he whispered.
As they stared at one another, Charlie could almost hear the very air between them suddenly snap and crackle with static and electricity, and he felt the ignition as profoundly as the wood feels the flame when the match is lit. Everyone sensed The Moment before a kiss. As his chest swelled with a plethora of emotions, he almost fell in love at that very second with a simple look: Frankie's endearment. No other human on earth had ever regarded Charlie in such a way before, a look so foreign to him that he couldn't quite find the correct words to describe it. As he thought of what songstresses and bards might sing and say in sonnets, he felt his heart blush with warmth like his whiskey-flushed cheeks. Frankie laughed aloud; it was not one out of spite, but of wistfulness. As he eyed the handsome rabble-rouser through splashes of colours dashed across their features from the stained-glass lampshade, soaking them in crown yellow, Frankie green, carnelian red, and royal blue, he felt as though he'd found the treasurable end of the rainbow and its pot of gold so desperately sought. He wondered if Frankie felt so, too. Charmed, Charlie observed the other boy, focusing on lips that glistened crimson like raspberries, cheeks filled with rich ruby blood, skin as beige as bark, eyes like pinnated leaves split asunder by sunlight, and he truly understood why all the pretty girls and boys liked Frankie: he was the personified quintessence of the woodlands.
When his attentiveness thrived into intenseness, Carrozza hoarsely said, 'I knew your name.'
'Hmm?'
'Before, when we first met in Whiteley Hall, I asked for your name, but I already knew it,' he answered. 'I already knew who you were.'
Charlie's expression softened into a plea. Thinking back, he couldn't quite be certain of who'd instigated it, but he believed now that their faces were drawn closer until their foreheads pressed together like magnetism. His heart and mouth had blossomed open like a carnation for Carrozza, but Frankie's mouth redirected from it. Charlie didn't recoil. He quickly fathomed that his wasn't reservation teasing him, but Carrozza's attempt not to give in to temptation. Whatever personal burdens plagued his heart, he surrendered to them by not surrendering. This was his refrain. When he felt one of Frankie's large hands encase his cheek, his own hands reached out eagerly to take ahold of his neck and jaw as though to urge the magic out of the mouth that wouldn't or couldn't meet his. They breathed heavily through their flaring nostrils, hearts pounding to reach across the divide wedged by abstinence. When Frankie pressed against the small of Charlie's back, his body quivered beneath his touch. Their heads grazed together like two cats, hair tickling skin and radiating heat that summoned renascent desire.
I surrender, Charlie yearned silently, his hand sliding down the nape of his neck to rest alongside the knee he was pressing into his thigh. If this is the moment of, whenever you're ready, can we surrender?
Rubbing his shoulders and arms, Frankie whispered against his temple, 'You're so ... you're so ingenuous.'
They were in flagrante delicto, here in the garden of the gods. In a world beyond this little one that they'd created in union with their bodies, writing the chapter by pressing pages of their stories together like interlocked fingers, they were destined to leave the fields and forests of youth behind to enter the kingdom and court of elders, where they'd be told their hearts were wrong by unclean hands and mouths. It was there, in that realm full of hypocrisy, where they'd be misunderstood and condemned as abominable sinners. Amongst the crowd of stone throwers, there would be, of course, those who'd walked the unspeakable rite of passage once their bodies were charged with change and they'd made do with what was made available to them—Heaven forbid, within temptation, those who shared the love that dares not speak its name, but will never tell a soul. One day, it may become nothing more than a distant memory once they'd long outgrown the uncommon love—of a time when innocent exploration did not deliver a fall from grace. But here, where they belonged now, they weren't heathens; here, they were as safe and free as the birds that fly above their paradise. Sheltered under curiosity, youth had become a sanctuary. Unbound by a prejudicial society, the same rules need not apply, for they had souls that knew not of what might besmirch them yet: they were too pure. The minds of their peers were not liberated or cleansed, just unfulfilled. If the vast majority was to indulge, the voice of naysayers was but a whisper amongst the babel. It wasn't defiance, but whilst young no such law or legislator existed to defy. Here in the in-between, their nature was more primitive than routine. Only one rule was enforced: joie de vivre.
Holding the forbidden fruit in his hands, temptation urging him to eat the golden apple, their noses squished together as Charlie glanced towards Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden, and to where Patroclus and Achilles lay forgotten and forever separated. His hand glided through the back of Frankie's head to thread through his soft curls until they coiled around his fingers, coppered in the light of the lamp. Although desire was limited by resistance, perhaps this was enough to declare apostasy against God, king, and country that damned them. If it was not to be seen beyond these days, access forbidden by Saint Peter shaking his head at the gates, then perhaps this little fleeting fragment of a treasurable memory made and shared here, where they tempted the Devil to take them, was their only visit of Heaven to come, even if only for just a precious moment in their lives. Before their liberty was shackled by parish compliance and civic duty, they were unencumbered and permitted to freely be their true selves more so than ever before and ever after. Here, underneath his transcending touch, where the silver linings were gilded gold. His wish to stay like this for the rest of eternity was indisputable, statued evermore in the youthful fervour of an amaranthine kiss that wasn't a kiss. Lost, but happy to be so. A thousand years, even. One thousand years, that's all.
The eager and senseless aggression of a fumbling, bumbling passion produced from craving hearts caused them to fall backwards together onto the carpet, knowing nothing else but each other. The fall and the collision broke them apart, but as Charlie looked to the rampant boy laying on top of his arm, an immense golden light speared through his chest to hitch his breathing, an unconquerable and profound sensation that ripped away a stagnant shadow that had lingered much too long inside to replace it with gilded happiness. These stories, with a history older than the foundations of these towns, these were the sort of stories left untold and left behind.
Sitting up, Frankie reached across to drop Charlie's foot onto his lap. He rubbed the foot, travelled on up his leg, and then kissed the sallow bruise stamped into his shin by the Rat King's cane. Strangely, the gesture didn't feel as intimate as much as their foreheads touching did.
'I'll have a word with Gillespie, tell him to lay off you,' he murmured.
'You think he'll listen to even you?' Charlie replied. 'Never worry, have no fear, as I do neither over Peter Gillespie.'
'I'm very persuasive.' Frankie smiled. 'How else do you think I got your help to mop those floors and tidy that kitchen? Or get you here tonight, even? He'll leave you be when I'm about.'
'Do you plan to be—' about?
When Frankie slumped back down onto the carpet beside him, before he quickly drifted into a drunken slumber, he revealed that even his reveries were regal when he asked, 'Do you ... dream of the gods?'
Charlie roused sometime later to settle eyes on the ceiling. The boy beside him was so quiet that he might as well be dead—sprawled on his front, face burrowed into a pillow, as deeply asleep as Endymion in the woods. Once his eyes drifted down to see Frankie's arm draped carelessly across his stomach, he bit his lips to murder a fool's smile.
Am I awake? Charlie gently touched the pinkish knuckles rising from his ribs to feel the grooves between, then carefully lifted the hand so as not to disturb the impossible boy as he rolled from under it. Or slumbering amidst my dreams, or somewhere within a realm between?
When Christian remorse descended dreadfully over him from notions of a carnal sin, only then did he realise that the cuff of his sleeve was trapped underneath Carrozza's shoulder. Reluctant to wake him, he reached across for the sharpest piece of the tumbler sparkling the carpet that Frankie had shattered earlier that night after failing to balance it on his head whilst performing keepie-ups. He used the shard of glass to cut the blue material before he slipped his forearm from it. As he wandered around the room and dressed, he found lotus flowers stuffed into the bookcases, pressed between book pages, littering under the lid of the piano, and thickening the fluff inside the pillows. With Catholic guilt weighing his heart with the ghosts of fear and shame, Charlie left Frankie's loft to allow him to ruse awake and form his own conclusion from the memories made, may they be considered cherished or scattered or regretted.
When he reached Baldwin's Bec, he met other boys hurrying home to race the lock-in; Wally had his leg dangling over the sill of his bedroom window on the ground floor; and Samuel was scaling the pipes.
'Help me!' he hissed to them, levelling Frankie's ladder under his own sill.
His window popped open like a punched pocket of an advent calendar, and Iggy Perkins hung out of it, a teal towel wrapped around his head like a fruit hat.
'Oh, it's you,' he said, pulling the collar of his purple dressing gown around his neck.
'Who else did you expect?' Charlie snapped back. 'The Queen Mother herself?'
Setting aside sliced cucumber and a bowl of turquoise face paste, Iggy held the top of the ladder as an apology and said, 'You're cutting it quite close, Belle de Jour. Didn't anyone on patrol spot your walk of shame?'
'I borrowed his punt.' Once Charlie had slid in through the open window, he hung out of it again to offer his thanks and praise to Wally, who then stowed the ladder back down the alleyway before dashing indoors. 'I think the Drama Master nearly spotted my stride of pride when I rustled a bit too much as I snuck along the banks of the River Thames to find the boat, but I hid behind a tree and pretended to be an owl to throw him off.'
Sliding off the bed, Iggy gripped his chin contemplatively. 'Hmmm, something is different about you now. Did you two—'
'No!' Charlie quickly barked, then winced at the loudness. The scent of Carrozza still clung to his skin, lapses of vanilla engulfing him sporadically like tide washing over coastline. Recalling his vision of a golden arrow made of light spearing through flesh and bone to reach his heart during the moment, Charlie lowered his voice to say, 'Everything inside me feels glittery. I think ... I think that Francesco Carrozza has finally awakened my dormant soul from a long and lonely and nothingness sleep.'