The dream stretched the corridors of the school cavernously until each one was as wide and windowless as castle dungeons, filled with smoke that smelled of burnt popcorn, charred meat, and spilt liquor as he raced through them. Recently heard songs played from the distance or somewhere in the hidden aether above, as faint as voices heard from in the streets afar. Frankie Carrozza's manic laughter called to him from up ahead, coaxing him along, goading him, urging him to follow. As he sprinted through the hallways, cloaked and hooded scholars loomed down on either side of him like pews in a church, callous and silver eyes gleaming from behind the sneering plague doctor masks that the austere effigies wore. Dark trousers and a crumpled white shirt solidified Frankie's presence in the dark beyond, glimpsing the soles of his white tube socks as they flashed in the shadows like headlights and road signs. A pinhole tunnel of white light emerged from yonder, an iridescent spark from faraway worlds that grew larger as he approached. Charlie called out desperately for him to wait, for him to allow him to come with to wherever he would loyally follow, but the words never left his mouth. Reaching the end of shadowed cloisters, Charlie clung to a pillar and overlooked sunlit green and beige fields. As zephyr combed through the grass, wheat, and trees, Frankie was already dashing through the stalks, his face blurred with surrealism and sunlight, to hold the soft, milky flesh of arms that belonged to a girl with long reddish hair, the colours of chestnuts and conkers. Whilst the faceless pair span like a carousel through sunshine, ribbons, streamers, and vibrant flowers underneath a garlanded bough, Charlie watched from the darkened archway, unable to feel the heat of the sun on his skin. He was fearful, but he was unsure if it was needful.
Time, he thought, the utmost merciless enemy, soon brings each and every dance to an unexpected close, but it is who we are in the arms of once the song ends.
Once he felt hands grab his arms roughly, he twisted around to see the scholars in their masks made of black and white marble close in on him, clerical collars glistening on their necks. The cult dragged him away from the halcyon day, and he fell down, down, down into darkness, down into a snug little pit of mud and stone—may it be a crypt made in a graveyard or one made in a bed. As he struggled to turn on his side to climb his way out, he only woke to Iggy Perkins tapping him once he felt shovels of dirt being thrown on top of him.
'I just had the strangest dream, Iggs,' Charlie whispered dreamily and groggily, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he yawned.
'What about?'
'I ... I can't seem to recall.' Charlie frowned, darkened corridors, sunny days, white shirts, straw hats, demonic masks, trouser braces, bunting, ribbons, meadows, and brightly coloured streamers slipping from a mind that felt coated in webbing as remnants of the milky dream dispersed like water cupped in fingers. 'Doesn't matter, I am no longer there: I am here with you.'
'Riveting,' Iggy murmured, pushing a mug of tea into Charlie's hands. 'Get dressed; we're late for meeting Rose. Charlie, you're ... you're not still very cross with me, are you?'
'And what would I have to be angry about?' Charlie snapped irritably, sitting up against his headboard. He looked out the window and dangled his foot over the sill, the sounds of birds and boys on the hunt for adventure and misadventure resounding from below.
Izzy fidgeted with his shirt, then shrugged his shoulders to discard his pride like the school blazer. 'It was an outlandish revelation, is all, seemingly plucked magically out of thin air like a rose in winter. It had taken me by surprise, and I just needed some time to register it.' He rolled his eyes. 'Well, think of it like this: how would you feel had I popped up and told you that I had Francesco Carrozza in my bed? Just completely ... just completely out of the blue like that. There it is! This little piece of scandal pushed to the extremes. How would you have handled it? What would you've thought?'
Charlie bobbed his knee and pondered. I'd have shrugged and believed my friend, he thought. But was that the truth of it? He felt inclined to say it, but only because it happened to him. As he considered it all—the sudden appearance, the rapid evolution of each occurrence—it felt like a bizarre dream bleeding into the day: sharing a bed with Frankie Carrozza was as mythical as the chance to behead a unicorn.
'I ... I don't rightly know,' he answered earnestly.
'Just as I thought. Now get up before Rose sends a battalion.'
They found Seraphina Rose under a redwood tree that protruded kingly from the ornate flowers in the meadows of the Windsor Castle gardens, sitting supping on tea like an old royal ghost in a white collared navy dress with a black bow in her long blonde hair.
'I'm overjoyed to hear that you two cherubs have kissed and made up, as I was very close to contacting the MI5 negotiators I know,' she said, overlooking the picturesque lake to eye Frogmore House. As she ran her nails through the back of Charlie's head, everything seemed to neatly smoothen over like a hot iron pressed to bedsheets. 'You are both as stubborn as the stains of lovemaking.'
Lazing on the grass under the September sunlight, the afternoon was spent eating Eton messes, smoking cigarettes, and watching autumn shed leaves from the trees, curling inwards like crumpled paper stung by flames once they were amber, persimmon, crimson, beige, yellow, or a golden shade without its shine.
'Well, darling, after all, he is the male counterpart to me, isn't he? And so, with that being said, of course I'm going to want to know how it was so that I can compare it to my own wily ways. That is one thing we've never challenged one another on in all our years together: the discovery of who was the inferior and who was the superior between he and I. I believe that is a contest best left without a champion victorious—that is, if there even would be one,' Seraphina confessed. 'And so tell me, was it simply the shores of paradise? Was it an ecstasy beyond the capability of poetry? A pleasure exceeding the touch of song? A rhapsody surpassing the boundaries forced by the natural limitations of humanity?'
Perhaps there were hundreds or thousands of lovely words available that could attach a satisfactory description to the night to an artistic extent, but Charlie couldn't quite find a single one whatsoever to explain it to anyone. A security system inside himself was flashing murderous red, his senses thumping feet as they raced towards panic stations, blaring warnings that only one single word could be used: personal.
Instead, to protect Frankie's image with restraint, he said, 'It was great, but it wasn't what you think it was.'
'Great?' Iggy screeched incredulously. 'He's a blooming boy, not this bloody ice-cream!'
'Well, what do you want to hear, Iggy? What can I say to you that'll take the twist out of those knickerbockers riding up you?'
'Was he simply charming, darling?' asked Rose. She quickly added, 'Well, I know Carrozza to be charming—first and foremost before anything else, more often than not. But what I mean to ask is this: was he aware that you were truly there? A human boy sat before him, filled with blood and bits and heart and soul, rather than just a set of lips to touch and flesh to caress?' she prodded gently, and Charlie wondered if she often thought very long and hard before she spoke to ensure that everything she uttered wouldn't be nondescript. 'It is just that ... only I know Frankie. More than I know myself, perhaps—not to mention my bankable knowledge of the Kama Sutra and its two secret sequels in the trilogy—and I know that he possesses enough charisma to charm both Devil and Reaper into claiming another, I just wanted to ensure that he made love to your mind as well as your body.'
'He made love to nothing! W-we—we didn't do anything of the sort, nothing like that,' Charlie spluttered. 'But rest assured, I wasn't used. He was fully present, I was fully present, and we were both fully aware of each other's presence to make a friendship out of it. Companionship from in out of the storm, that's all it was.'
'Oh!' She drew back. 'Well, whatever it's worth, you have my blessing to participate in that sort of intimate act. However, the one thing you mustn't do is give up everything. That is to say, you mustn't ever fall in love. There is a trick to it: be clever. I pull that trick constantly. See, love is for fairy tales, silly sods, the weak, and the old, but never for the young. When lovers are young, we fail to grasp that everything else around us is old. And when we understand that, we find that only youth remains in our hands, but never ours to keep. In time, everything older pulls at us to separate us beyond our control, as we must eventually join it. And seldom do we do together. The love may seem palpable at the time, but in the divide that is in due course against our will, that, too, is rarely ever ours to keep. With youth, we are free to roam the fields, but when also in love, we find we're only like witless livestock in the paddock: kept for the slaughter, with a watchful eye above and grass much too green below. Darling, try not to attach sentimentality to it—which, I'm sorry to say, you seem to have a propensity for.' Seraphina squinted thoughtfully, her arm bent crookedly to allow cords of smoke to curl between pearl-coloured fingernails. She shared the exact same wistful gaze as her cousin, his emerald eyes shining from her face. 'May I ask, though I've never known him not to be, but was he kind?'
'He only gave me shelter from the storm, so he definitely was that,' Charlie answered, somewhat befuddled. 'You've got it all wrong, that was all it was. It was nothing.' And simultaneously, he thought, it was everything.
'Oh, splendid! Will you be seeing Frankie again? Are you very fond of him now?' she asked, pulling a bottle of champagne from her bag before popping it. 'The bubbly is entirely coincidental, but it suits the mood for mirth and celebration, don't you find?'
'I thought we'd made a friend of one another, so I wouldn't mind it'—Charlie took a long sip of champagne from one of the crystal glasses that she'd stolen from only-God-knows-where—'but how he feels about it is an entirely different story altogether and basically what the repeat depends upon. I can't dodge him forever, I suppose.'
'It wouldn't be forever, so much as it would only be for now.' Rose's emerald irises glittered as vivaciously as her bangles. Seemingly sensing his inner turmoil, she firmly cupped a hand under his chin so that he felt both the coolness of her jewels and the warmth of her skin. 'Little cherub of mine, he'll find you as equally as bewitching as I did upon our first encounter on that train from London to Slough, and feel just as compelled to forge a friendship with. Be a friend to him, Charles; Lord knows that Frankie could do with one like you.'
'If he was so keen to befriend Charlie, he's hardly going to toss him aside after a night of gregariousness as though he was nothing more than a wet handkerchief, is he?' Iggy inquired, licking spilt drink off the back of his hand. 'If he even dares, I'll—I'll neuter him like a dog and make a pocket watch from the remains.'
'You'd be surprised.' Seraphina shrugged her eyebrows. A rather worrisome fire danced in her eyes as she lay down against Iggy's lap to smirk towards the eaves, a flame that was a sure sign that merrymaking was underway. If Charlie's panacea was a bittersweet moment brewed for the sake of nostalgia, and Ignatius Perkins' nostrum was entertaining to uproarious applauds from an audience, Seraphina Rose's drug of choice was a revelrous catastrophe burned solely to gladden her heart. 'And here I thought that I had an interesting evening at my aunt's wedding once I provoked an upheaval by showing up to outshine the bride in my very own sparkling gown of white.' Seraphina snorted, lighting another cigarette and nudging her Breton cap back. 'Ghastly bores, the lot of them. They'd harped on all year about how they'd wanted a fairy tale wedding, but they were not amused in the slightest when I appeared villainously to curse their firstborn.'
'Frankie Carrozza—'
'Iggy, for the love of god! Please, can we stop talking about him?'
'That's going to be rather difficult'—Iggy pointed passed Charlie's ear—'considering he is en route.'
'Oh, did I neglect to mention that I didn't come here alone?' Seraphina murmured, sitting up to spin the navy Breton cap into Frankie's hand like a Frisbee.
As Charlie's head snapped around, his excited heart made a triumphant leap skyward towards his throat as though to get a peek at him itself. Frankie had arrowed down the green on a shiny red motor scooter to swerve around the lake, skidding to an abrupt halt nearby and spraying a whip of grass and dirt.
'Charlie Chance!' he bellowed brightly, rising up on the scooter. Once he'd donned his cap, he was remarkably redolent of an old sea captain standing at the prow of his whaling ship on the maritime, looking out over the tempestuous ocean that he and his fishermen braved in search of a legendary cetacean. Glancing surreptitiously over his shoulder in the direction he'd just come, he asked, 'Care to go for a ride?'
'Oh, I bet he would,' Iggy muttered under his breath; Charlie's elbow twitched from the impulse to dig it into him to quell his snorts of laughter.
Seraphina gestured to the scooter with her glass. 'Frankie, just where did you get that thing from?'
'Found it!' Rising over the handlebars and looking back in the direction he'd just come once again, he said hurriedly, 'Well, Chance, what do you say?'
Under her breath, Seraphina whispered to him, 'Have an adventure with him, Charlie; regardless of what fabricated tales that school of yours has spun about him, Frankie is great for those.'
'Yes! Yes, he would!' cried Iggy, shoving at a dumbfounded Charlie until he was forced to stand. He raised his glass to his lips and shooed Chance with the other hand. 'In fact, we wouldn't mind seeing the back of him for awhile.'
Charlie took slow, deliberate steps towards the vehicle.
'Safety first.' Once he'd fixed riding goggles over his eyes, Frankie unhooked a helmet from the handle and popped it onto Charlie's head, spiritedly slapping the top of it. 'Hop upon my steed, fair maiden, and I shall bear you away from the cruel confinements of this cold castle!'
When Charlie threw his leg over the long tanned leather seat, Frankie kicked up the stand and twisted the key to stir the motor until it roared. The two boys then looked to the other boy and girl still drinking on the grass.
'She could hardly be royal when the only thing she'd look decent in is a body bag,' said Rose, narrowing her eyelids to sharpen her thorns as she eyed another female that was strolling through the gardens in the opposite direction to pretend that this wasn't an unordinary request for the two boys' sakes. Charlie fell in love with her a little for it. 'Did she put her make-up on with a shotgun? And those teeth! With gnashers like that, she could eat an apple through a letterbox.'
In unison, both Iggy and Seraphina turned to catch a glimpse of Frankie and Charlie, quickly looking to Frogmore House behind them yonder as though they were speaking about the architectural history, their curiosity turning studious.
'Serph,' Frankie called in greeting and farewell, tipping his Breton cap to her.
'Frankie,' Serph replied, saluting him with a hand to her brow like a general willing to send her troops into dire circumstances.
As he gripped the sides of the long leather seat, Charlie was overcome with his body's intense response to finding Carrozza between his legs; overwhelmed with otherworldly sensations, his pulse flushed a flood of scorching blood through his veins, electrifying his limbs as though he'd been struck with a mild bolt of lightning. However, he carefully positioned himself behind him so that he barely touched the other boy. Frankie sat hunched casually over the handles, his own riding goggles dangling around his neck.
A string of violent and abusive roars came bolting down the gardens towards them, soaked with such blistering rage that the spew almost seemed as palpable—and just as loud—as gunshots.
'It's probably in your best interest to shimmy closer and hold on tight to me,' Carrozza advised, careening his neck to look over his shoulder slightly. 'We wouldn't want for the wrong speed or a poorly placed stone to unseat and upend you into the luggage carrier or through the air.'
Charlie looked over his own shoulder to see a man running frantically across the green towards them, flailing his arms wildly as though he was coaxing down a plane. He could clearly see a small square patch of black hair twitching indignantly on his upper lip as if he'd missed a spot whilst shaving, his face so scarlet with rage that it looked like a piece of turf lobbed on top of smouldering coals. His mortarboard blew off into the lake, but his bandy-legged charge continued relentlessly, his trousers so apparently uncomfortable underneath his gown that he looked like he had a hot poker shoved somewhere ill-fated.
'CARROZZA, YOU MUTINOUS LITTLE SHIT! GIVE ME BACK MY SCOOTER THIS INSTANT!' the scholar bellowed, his fist shaking a righteous fury to the heavens above as though to summon divine intervention as backup.
Just as Frankie's upper lip tugged up the side of his cheek to form a mischievous grin, Iggy and Seraphina began to clap and laugh wholeheartedly. Rather than listen to his disposition screeching warnings for him to get off, Charlie scooted forward and gripped the renegade's sides. The wheels of the scooter kicked up a swirl of muck and pebbles behind them to speed around the other side of the lake and careen towards the nearest gate, leaving the babel of a jubilant hurrah far behind them.
When they'd paused to divert traffic, Charlie found himself asking him, 'What compels you to carry out such notions?'
'A mercurial mind,' he called loudly over the hum of the scooter. 'To never postpone, to never dillydally, or try to compromise with time. To grasp tight and hang on indefinitely and defiantly to the finest opportunities that present themselves—fleetingly. Every single day we're presented with a choice, Charlie: to lie yourself down and dig your grave or to riot against your dying day. For nothing lasts forever, except for, perhaps, the shades of the night sky!'
With Frankie remaining as firm as an effigy on the vibrating machine, Charlie clung tight to him for safety, and wondered, Are you a friend? A lover? What qualifies for either term? Oh, it sounds so absurd and bourgeois. How about a bedfellow? Bedfellow, my bedfellow.
They bolted thoughtlessly through Windsor Great Park to scatter tourists trekking the Long Walk towards Windsor Castle, then returned to town to take shortcuts by lurching onto the curb and skirting down the cobbled alleyways. They cut between the parishioners exiting the church, upsetting a wedding with several toots of the horn to part the party like Moses did the Red Sea, sending the bride's headdress floating ghostly into the wind as she howled like a banshee. When fists were shaken after them, Carrozza sent a cheery wave behind. Dispersing pigeons into the disgruntled faces of visitors at the town centre, with Frankie driving under the assumption that everything that lay before them would give way to let him through, they zoomed out onto Peascod Street. As they redirected for Windsor Bridge, Frankie snatched the lit cigarette from the hand of a suited businessman, who'd been hanging out the window of his silver Ford Cortina to argue with the little old lady holding up traffic in a mobility scooter.
Drive! Charlie thought as they crossed the bridge into Eton, repositioning his head so as not to poke Carrozza's spine with the black beak of his burgundy helmet when Frankie passed the rest of the cigarette back to him. Drive along the open road for all eternity, or at least until the fuel runs out, and maybe then I'll think it'll be enough. Time flies, but so will we.
Just as he finished the thought, they broke out onto Common Lane, where Frankie pulled their journey to a stop outside Penn House. He pushed the kickstand down with his foot, then stuck fingers in his mouth to whistle loudly.
'Jones must be out on the lam,' he murmured a minute later when no-one answered, frowning at the shadow-clogged windows of Penn House. 'No matter, we're not here for Jones or for Penn House.'
'What are we here for, then?' Charlie asked.
'You'll see.' He winked, offering his shoulder to help the boy dismount. Once they'd hung the goggles and helmet around the handlebars, Carrozza tugged his jumper to lead him in a half-jog back down the road towards the building opposite. When they hopped the rickety wooden fence into the overgrown garden of Caxton House, a small red-brick building that looked like a century-old primary school, Frankie crept down and loosened a brick behind a spout to reveal a rusted key. As the other boy fiddled with the keyhole at the entrance, Charlie acted as lookout for signs of trouble afoot, listening above the monotonous chirps of insects and the dull honks from ducks in the ponds nearby for the sounds of expensive boots or wheels over gravel, rubbing his arms as the brisk evening began to cool the last of the warm summer air. Only then did he notice that Frankie was using his blue jumper sleeve as a headband, which he'd shorn from around his arm the night before so as not to rouse him. When the door was opened, Carrozza asked, 'Did you have fun?'
'I—I can't say I ever thought hijacking property as an accessory to misdeeds could be deemed fun, to be fair. It was exhilarating, nonetheless,' answered Charlie, following him inside as the dark eventide quickly washed away the bright afternoon. 'As is breaking and entering—'
'No, you dope. I was referring to last night.' Frankie chuckled heartily, shaking his head as he removed a torch from his satchel and clicked it on. 'That is, unless you consider that a misdemeanour, too? A careless act of misjudgment, maybe? A repented blot on spotless sheets, perhaps? A dark mark besmirching the purest of souls, mayhap?'
Grateful that he was in the shadows when his cheeks started to redden, Charlie felt a knot that he was initially unaware of unravel in his gut, glad to find that Carrozza did, in fact, remember, and was aware of the actions he had committed—of what they had almost done, and of what they were doing.
'It was certainly something, all right. I mean to say, it was a good sort of something. But if I don't have a name for it, then how can I think of it as a transgression? The short answer is: fun was had,' Charlie replied to the dark. 'I didn't think—I wasn't sure if ... I didn't know if you—'
'Regretted it? Quite the contrary.' Carrozza turned to blast his face with the beam of the torch. 'Aside from avoiding the lock-in, I wondered if that was why you left in the middle of the night. We didn't do anything ... unreligious, if that's what you fear.' He looked amused as he stood before him in the dimly-lit corridor with his hand shoved deep into the pocket of his faded blue jeans and his shoulders curled over, his mustard-coloured jumper tumbling over the waistband with an endearing hole in the hem. 'You've done nothing to be ashamed of. Your ingenuous nature, an innocence sweet like honey, is safe along with your soul. I'm glad we had the chance to have this discussion, Chance. Even if it did take burglary for us to do so.'
Looking to the torch in his hand, he asked, 'Did you plan this?'
'Planned it? Precautions, Charles. I always have an array of equipment on me, old fellow. That's what makes me an utilitarian. The accusations a poor chap gets just for having a torch on him. Tut-tut!' Frankie wandered on down the echoey corridor, pouring light into every hidey-hole he passed. 'If you truly think that I'd seen you, Ignatius Perkins, and Seraphina Rose from the Queen's Library, went outside to have a cigarette, found the scooter with the keys in the ignition, distracted the owner with a well-devised lie during his dress rehearsal for some ceremony, then nicked said scooter to take you somewhere excluded so that we could have this talk ... then you, my dear boy, have a severe case of mistrust and a highly overactive imagination. You're simply lost to hypnagogia, my boy!'
'Or you're simply a maniac.' Charlie smiled, realising that he was beginning to feel comfortable with the other boy now that he was slowly showing glimpses of humanity underneath his godlike presence. His legend was no longer a tide rising to swallow him whole, but a shallow surf washing warmly between his toes.
'Or that.' Frankie jerked his head in agreement. 'Chance, you can be quite the little bumblebee with the sharpest stinger at times, you know. I can't say I don't enjoy it.'
The door clanged shut behind them once they entered the hall, the smell of chlorine suddenly assaulting their senses. Before them, a six-lane twenty-five-metre indoor swimming pool glowed iridescently in the dark.
'What do you think?' Frankie gestured proudly.
'I think ...' Awed, Charlie stepped towards the edge, the magical shimmer of the aqua waters reflecting on their faces, the roof, the walls. 'I think it looks like a portal into another world.'
'It could be,' said he, his voice resounding over the euphonious trickles. 'If we just think really hard. If we simply wish it. If we can only imagine. If we can play pretend, just maybe it is.'
When he backed up, Charlie bumped into Frankie, knocking his satchel off his shoulder. He lunged for it, grasping ahold to the straps just in time to save his pens and jotters and miscellaneous items from spilling out, but a black book tumbled out to whack the floor, a resounding thump bouncing off the night pressing against the wall of blackened windows.
'Are you just aiming for my bag now?' Frankie asked nonchalantly.
The floor split the spine of the book and it landed opened. In the slither of sunset kissing the glass, so far as Charlie could tell by the lack of dated entries, he quickly realised that it wasn't a journal. As his eyes scanned the lists of names pouring down the pages, he no longer thought that it was schoolwork, either. He had stumbled across Francesco Carrozza's warehouse of contacts documented in his playbook, and the extract he'd seen of it was mind-boggling:
David Cotter - artwork
Benjamin Barnes - mainstream pornography
Oliver Jenkins - alcohol
Bradley Valentine - importation
Kingsley Cole - counterculture pornography
Michael Veress - marijuana
Johnny Covaci - illicit stimulants
Sidney Lane - information
George December - banned products
Ciarán Quinn - the best whiskey about
The columns went on and on, pages upon pages of names and assets, but Frankie snatched the hardback out of his hand before he could skim through the rest.
'Are you ... are you blushing? Good gracious, are you ... embarrassed?' Charlie demanded, but the boy only rubbed the back of his head and stared back at him inquisitively. 'So, the rumours are true.'
Feigning obliviousness, Frankie grinned and looked elsewhere, then said, 'I haven't a clue what you're talking about, so I'm pleading the fifth.'
'That you do fight merciless mercenaries, I mean!' Charlie gasped jokily. He reached across to point out the faint white-pink scar sliced on the flesh beneath the inner joint of his elbow that was in the shape of a crucifix, his finger trailing down his forearm to touch the matching cicatrix of a wing branding his wrist. 'And how you have created all sorts of avenues to all your strange tastes, of course.'
Stoic by nature, Frankie didn't say a thing and only lit up a cigarette, unabashed.
'The legendary ledger of lists that is Frankie Carrozza's fabled playbook: his little black book. Mind you, it isn't exactly little by any means, is it?' Charlie refrained from mentioning the means that Frankie may have carried out to procure such a cobwebbed network—be that by haggling, gambling, blackmailing, exchanging, or manipulating. He believed that was best left unmentioned, perhaps.
'Did you really think that omnipotence didn't come with a price, Chance?' he replied finally, taking the cigarette from his mouth and handing it to Charlie. As he lit another, he added, 'All spells have their curses.'
'I saw Sidney Lane's name in there,' he replied, pointing to the book. 'The budding journalist and editor of the newsletter, the same boy who wants to become a private investigator.'
'The very one,' Carrozza answered, hiding behind a cloud of smoke. He shook the book. 'An old present from Trevor Hamilton.'
'Is it your favourite?' Charlie asked. 'It's certainly the one you're most guarded about. Curious, you even have the names of some of your friends in there. Is mine yet?'
'My favourite?' Frankie laughed incredulously, then threw the book into the swimming pool with his cigarette. The black book of spoils sunk to the bottom of the watery depths, along with the secrets and unsavoury lives of their surrounding peers.
When he'd removed his socks and shoes and trousers, the entrepreneur jumped in after it—not to retrieve it, but to swim. Without needing to be coaxed, Charlie stripped to his underwear and jumper to dive in after him. Kicking up from the bottom, his head broke the surface to wade the waters and laugh aloud. Once he'd wiped excess water and hair from his face, Frankie waded forward until they were close enough to kiss, arms and legs stirring the depths.
Charlie spat a mouthful of bitter water at him, then breathlessly asked, 'Can I ask you something? You said you knew my name even before you knew me. What did you think of me when we first met?'
'You're exactly how I imagined you would be,' he said. After he spurted a jet of water into the other boy's mouth from his own, he asked, 'And me?'
Charlie's chest felt buoyant as he fell backward to float on his back. And because friends tell each other the truth, he confessed: 'Everything and more.'
Weighed down by his jumper and simper, he took a deep breath and sunk underwater to cool his enflamed cheeks. The world immediately fell silent, the blue abyss gurgling in his ears like thunderclouds rumbling in the distance. Frankie followed him under. Waterlogged, they began to circle one another, twirling through the unnatural blue with their eyes fixated on each other. Then, moving in slow motion, knees up near the chest of his mustard-coloured jumper that had ridden up to expose his bony bronze ribcage, the black of his underwear the only distinct colour down here, Frankie gradually propelled towards Charlie and kissed him on the mouth as gently as the bubbles that slipped from it. Grabbing fistfuls of mustard so as to respond somehow to the surreal mixture of both fact and fantasy, he felt Frankie's leg graze against the insides of both of his.
Here, dangling between land and sky, they were safe from rule and realm.
Their heads broke the surface to pop out breathlessly, sucking in great lungfuls of air. Bewildered, Charlie eyeballed the other boy until he started to laugh hysterically. Carrozza mimicked him. Before the spell ended, Chance swam the distance to quell the longing of his hunger. Sweeping hair from the other boy's eyes, Frankie kissed him again and Charlie's mouth opened willingly, his lips warm and wet against his as he drained the Holy Grail, drinking him in to the bottom of the chalice to taste his scent mixed with chlorine and smoke, to feel the hum of his heart against his own. He melted in Frankie's hands, bleeding into him like two threads sewn together. Charlie was elsewhere: through a portal to a magical realm. He soared into an otherworld, where the breeze on the seashore smelled of vanilla and Carrozza was the warmth of the sand between his toes, arms encompassing him to wash over him like a salty surf.
When Frankie gripped the sides of his head and leant his body downwards so that his shoulders hunched up in the backdrop like two knobby wings, the kiss heating Charlie's squirming insides like a bowl of porridge, their souls moved beyond the confinements of their entwined bodies. Both demon and man might watch on, but Charlie did not care; all the horrors elsewhere in the world were elsewhere and worse, and so on their worries went, soaring back out of edging along the paradise they'd bloomed between them together. Dusk and autumn were settling all around them, and as all things prepared to die for the season, they were resolved to live. When Charlie jumped up to sit on the edge of the pool, Frankie slid the cool heat of himself between his knees and placed his hands on them, countering the other boy with equally mustered zealous ardour. The possession of passion consumed Charlie, tempted by an act beyond his control; he could not—or, rather, would not—contain himself. Perhaps this was his cure, maybe this gesture was to be his exorcism of fervour. He pressed his mouth as hard as he could against Carrozza's, his top lip slipping between his two like smooth legs writhing together underneath silk sheets, both cursing the distance between. The kiss ended when the two boys stopped to smile and laugh against each other's mouth, teeth nipping and grazing the skin of their lips. He pried Carrozza's face from his own and cradled it in his hands. Frankie looked to his eyes and lips as a wolf would prey, his own mouth kissed swollen and red, but Charlie held him still to scrutinise his face; there was a bittersweetness to his expression in the seconds after their mouths disengaged, and he wondered if this was how he looked when he roused in mornings: puzzled and dreamy with childlike curiosity. It was Frankie Carrozza epitomised, in a sense: it was the performance of all the right moves in a wonderful heist. The theory of evolution proclaimed that atoms had forged Frankie Carrozza from a star that had shattered a long, long time ago, but he blazed like one now shooting tonight. A smoky, starry universe embodied inside a mustard-coloured jumper, dripping with galaxies and nebulas.
Wiping his mouth on his forearm like a boy removing an auntie's lipstick-smeared kiss, Carrozza hopped up to sit beside him, swishing his legs through the water.
Gripping the rim of the pool with both hands, Charlie asked, 'Aside from last words, untranslatable words, and trinkets, you collect people, too, don't you?'
'Mmm. I collect sensational facts, too,' Frankie murmured into his shoulder. 'For instance, Jean Lafitte, a French-American pirate, heard that the governor had offered a $500 bounty for his capture, and so he offered a $5000 reward for the detainment of the governor in turn. Feeling that this sounds like a withered, old past life belonging to this even older soul of mine, I pulled this stunt hundreds of times before since. Would you like to hear whispers of another Rose?' Frankie lit a cigarette, and Charlie nodded. 'The Naval Investigative Service began investigating homosexuality in the Chicago area once agents overheard a few queer folk—you know, musical men—often referring to themselves as "friends of Dorothy", a term monikered after Judy Garland's performance as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, which many seemed to find resonation in—in the tragic life of poor Judy, the songs, or leaving the land of bland black and weak white for a magical one full of vivacious technicolour, perhaps. My interpretation is that each and every one of them will have met a variation of Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion at least once. The agents of the NIS were unfamiliar with the historical meaning behind the term and misinterpreted the code. Rather than realising that it was a safe way to expose prohibited natures, they wrongfully believed that this was actually referring to some woman named Dorothy, who was at the centre of some sort of massive ring of poofy personnel. They launched an enormous and futile hunt for the ever so elusive Dorthy, hoping that when they found her that they might convince her to reveal the names of her limp-wristed service members before they could revolt.'
'Dare I ask what time it is?' Charlie smiled, envisioning Seraphina Rose as a ferocious version of Dorothy—all guns and garters.
'Can't say I know,' Frankie remarked. 'I don't wear a watch. Who would want to hear every second of their lives tick passed as a sorry reminder? It's about eight o'clock or so, I'd say, but that's me judging time by the position of the sun in the sky earlier in the day.'
Charlie grinned an incredulous grin, a smile only meant for Carrozza and his ponderous company. Another cigarette, he thought. Another cigarette, and then we'll call it a day. And what a day it was. He asked, 'How do you plan to get out of this one, anyhow?'
'Do you mean the scooter?' Frankie shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly and scrunched up his nose as though what he'd committed was nothing short of juvenile. 'I'll say it was an emergency.'
'Do you have no fear or shame?'
The boy frowned as though the question posed was a rather silly one, and replied, 'Shame and fear and regrets over such silly little matters are for the dead to amuse themselves with. You purr ... in your sleep, like a cat, did you know?' Frankie brushed his lips along his forearm as he rotated his head. 'A struggling little moan that buzzes in the back of your throat and sort of ... purrs. Don't be so bashful, as it has come to be one of my favourite sounds. You remind me of a faun from folklore when you doze, a rosebud mouth with winter-rouge cheeks. Such a pretty mouth.'
Charlie looked to the heavy book that had sunk to the bottom of the pool, pages scattered by their feet. The question fluttered curiously in his mind like a bird trapped in an attic, and so he breathed life into it: 'In that little black book of yours, what do I fall under? I can't seem to think of anything I have that is worth possessing like all the other boys and girls listed in there, so what could I offer you that you can't get elsewhere?'
'I'm in search of my soul; I fear I lost mine some time ago.' His defeated reply sighed against the back of Charlie's hand. 'I consider you my second chance. So, gun to my head, I suspect I'd jot you down under humanity.'
Charlie didn't want to doubt those words, his belief and the other boy's conviction strong enough to punch his own out his lips and lungs. Truthfully, he didn't understand his meaning or quest, but he didn't care. It was enough just to hear it. His heart began to pound and pulse throughout his entire body, but the organ did not wish to leave him to such sensational sensations this time.
'You had your reservations last night,' Chance stated, looking to his forehead. 'Why now? Why not last night?'
'I could ask you the same thing.' Frankie cleared his throat against his fist. 'They say my kiss is a curse. They say it causes downfalls and damnations. But just then, when we were underwater, it felt free from fault. Like we could be anyone else but ourselves, like we could be anywhere else but here. Down there, this could be our little secret. It felt ... safe. Now you, why did you?'
'When I was in bed last night, I thought about it long and hard—shut up,' Charlie warned. 'I thought about those tales you told of old Etonians gone before us. I understand now that it's the littlest things you cherish the most in youth once you lose grasp of it. For instance, for how long does sharing a locker or a changing cubicle in the local swimming pool with a sexless chum remain sheer innocence? What is held dearest is found in the adventures had wandering through fields and trees, collecting treasure troves of conkers, acorns, unique stones, seashells, pinecones, and winged seeds, knowing all their names and how they look in the breast of each season. It is the adoration of the lost freedom from blame, when the frame is young and hairless, stripping material brazenly from the flesh to brace the waters of a river like a babe to baptism—careless, unconcerned, and sinless, long before shame or pride claims the worth of baring the body. I think we're still in that period, so anything collected now is but a unique treasure.' Charlie scratched his nose with the back of his hand and looked across the glowing water, his voice skipping it like a stone to resound against the black glass windows. 'For a time will come in which we shall stand and look to all that we know and have known around us, only to find that we now walk its realm a stranger to it. A virus has infected this world, an old and ancient cancer that has always been, determined to oust its rustic spirit, an unforgiving entity in the form of three brothers: time, change, and civilisation. One day, I fear I'll be cursed with a crippling, melancholic nostalgia: to know I can never return. From time to time, bittersweet memory will remain to allow me to revisit what once was with a fraction of how it once felt—but as faint as an echo, a petal left behind as a reminder of the rose. A lonely affliction to adore that it happened, living on, untouchable, within your mind like the memory of a loved one lamented, and to know what shall never be due to come around again—when we've become too old to see the gateway of the magical portal to somewhere special.'
'Go on,' Frankie urged softly.
'I'll spend my life weaving memories into the loop of time, like throwing dust in the wind, until I wake lost and late in the middle of the night, trying desperately to recall the sensation of feeling how it was to laugh from the very soul with a very young heart, and how it was to be fifteen-years-old with such farraginous thoughts, a time where I roamed the days whilst hearing the night calling, unaware that it was upon me until, suddenly, sunshine bleeds into moonlight.' Charlie took the lit cigarette, nodding his appreciation. 'As I look with yellowed eyes to unfamiliar hands, withered and wrinkled and no longer aglow with the pinkness of youth, I'll wonder when it was I realised that I was getting older, and when it was that I stopped screaming from the top of my lungs through the streets after dancing on the tables. A tie sits slung like a noose over the doorknob; a suit hangs freshly ironed in the wardrobe; leather black shoes gleam much too pristinely like the lakes I once splashed in on the floor, tucked together and needing scuffed. I wonder will I wonder if I'll wear them to my funeral? For where once was life now lays lifeless once utilised for wear like animals bred for the abattoir. Haunted, I'll fall back to sleep again trying to call to mind the ghosts of all those left behind in my past—the surge of their spirits, the tones of their voices, the tempos of their hearts that once sung like car radios, and the laughs and smiles that graced their joyful and triumphant faces. I imagine it'll be the minute moments and unapparent phenomenons that I'm fated to remember whilst I stand upon an open road with a rucksack slung over one shoulder, perhaps, an unending thoroughfare stretching ahead, surrounded by different friends and new faces belonging to those who will not understand anything else but their own burdens, regrets, and wistfulness due to be felt.'
'But wouldn't that be some sort of Hell to only know those you've known and never those who grow you til you're grown?' Carrozza asked.
'Maybe so. Perhaps without such memories, I would come to know some sort of peace; but deprived of them, that would mean that they'd never existed, and that is much too great a penance to suffer in exchange for looking back fondly and remembering the little things missed with glum gladness. After all, death is only worthy of your best memory.' Charlie inhaled deep, held, and then released. 'I looked religion in the face and I said to Hell with Christian Heaven. And that is my answer to why I was resolved to have you.'
'I think that you're both blessed and cursed with knowing about things that you know nothing about just yet.'
'You have me woven into your fingertips. I'm in your hands now, Carrozza, and you're free to do with that whatever you please. To obliterate or nurture with whatever whim that comes upon you—be that accidental or intentional.'
Frankie rose to leave. 'There's quite a lot going on in that little head of yours, isn't there?'
When he offered his hand out, Charlie took it to stand.