Frankie's arms lay limp over either side of the old clawfoot tub like canoe oars. A cigarette dangled from one hand, causing for grey streamers of smoke to dance up until they threaded through the steam of the hot water and became indistinguishable. He gazed upon the decorative plaster ceiling moldings, lost to a trance. He wasn't pondering anything particularly philosophical or profound as his smoking would usually suggest, due to having a penchant for mulling musings and puffing cigarettes. He believed he had seen film footage or too many pieces of art in which the subject standing for it was captured during reflection with a cigarette, cigar, or pipe in hand, and he'd noted the expressions etched upon their faces.
A clump of ash snowed onto the red carpet embroidered with gold scrollwork. A fireplace sat directly to the left of him, choked with coal; he was awaiting the tongue of fire due to punch through like the last survivor of a horrific ordeal. The room was much larger compared to his last one, and he shared it with no other, which he deeply enjoyed; however, the stigma of owning it had put considerable distance between him and the other boys along the corridor due to his being appointed his father's old lair before he even became a senior or prefect—whom it had been reserved for. Oh, the silly power of a name spoken often and a shiny coin.
There were two areas to it. The section he currently occupied was an open-planned stretch of a living area with a short set of mahogany steps leading up to a smaller segment, where his bed and bedroom door was situated. Just over the ornate banister of the stairwell onto the platform, he could see his remarkable treasure trove stacked on shelves on top of a chest that were stuck into the gap between the railing and the bed squished against the wall. The top shelf of the cabinet containing all of his pilfered pirate's hoard that was slowly beginning to grow was dedicated to his favourite items: snow globes gathered from all the corners of the world and all sorts of walks of life, acting as doorways to his memories. The second ledge comprised of metal soldiers, collectible miniature motorbikes that had belonged to his uncles and father, and a portmanteau and jewellery boxes with a few trinkets poking out. There were miscellaneous items that many would deem strange to hoard in his emporium; which included, but was not limited to: ornamental daggers, letter openers, the stuffed owl and kestrel, the netted bags of marbles and conkers, ceramic owls, glass butterflies, a Viking helmet, a faulty musket, jam jars filled with candles, decanters, old wines, tools, and a little birdcage. These were the sort of items that people keep cherished in their hearts due to their being sentimental portals to younger days, and if they ever wished for another to see them, they became tattoos—or so Frankie believed. Frankie had always dreamed of rousing to find a shrine that honoured the notion that he had ventured out to collect little pieces of the world to then bring them back and stack them like books on a shelf, giving memories a form for means of revisitation if he could not seep them into his skin. Aside from the scarf that had belonged to Martin Healy, the third shelf was empty but for one other item: a little origami dragon that Drew Hogarth had folded as a trophy that Carrozza had collected from him.
Each of them were items he treasured for various reasons, and it irked him that he could not use his entire body as a canvas so as to tattoo them all over it to join the two he had already imprinted upon himself—a black lion's paw printed over his heart that Trevor had branded him with once he'd procured a tattoo kit from only God knows where, and the word saoirse, which meant "freedom" in Gaelic, which Cahir Quinn had etched onto him after they spent a morning surfing in Barleycove, County Cork, the summer past.
The bedroom door burst open and Frankie flinched, rising up out of the bath. He settled back down into it again once he spotted Hamilton thundering down the steps with his face buried in a book, looking quite disdainful.
'And just where have you been all day?' Trevor demanded, not bothering to look up from his reading. 'I have been wandering about this room and these old halls awaiting your return like a ghostly dowager or a bored spinster aunt. Settling well into your new digs, I see.'
'At lessons; which is precisely where you ought to have been.' Frankie reclined his head back against the cast-iron rim lined with porcelain to stare at the ceiling again, blowing a puff of smoke up towards the roof to create the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast.
'Why should I attend a place such as that whilst the merits I require for the life I shall no doubt live can be self-taught all the more satisfactorily had I the time to spare?' Trevor responded, flicking the page of the book distastefully before tutting his disgust. He was wearing ashen-coloured breeches, Frankie observed, turning his head against the edge of the tub again, and a scarlet tunic that flowed down to his thighs like a pint of blood thrown over him. He'd taken it with him after he'd finished with drama class in the Farrer Theatre, of course. Hamilton truly enjoyed nothing more than to dress for the part as the mastermind villain antagonising the world; which was precisely how he viewed himself in the mirror—a boy that believed himself to be a growing cancer upon the earth, like fungus or black moss.
He ripped a page out of the book and cast it away from himself like a used handkerchief.
'What are you reading so violently?' Frankie asked, drawing his attention back to the ceiling once more as he gently writhed his legs back around.
'I'm a quarter of the way through The Crimson Grin by Jensen Romarty. I hope he twists restless in his grave, the old crypt keeper. Are you aware that this has been considered as a classic? A classic? What an astounding joke. I've read strips of the funnies at the back of the newspapers more worthy of a title,' Hamilton seethed, taking two oddly placed steps into the middle of the room near the windows and pouring feverishly over the pages. 'It is a whodunnit that ought to be referred to as a whywriteit if you ask me.'
'I didn't,' Frankie murmured drowsily, closing his eyes and bearding his cheeks with suds.
'It is a classic only by right because it has cleverly disguised the author's sanctimonious, pretentious, and diluted grandeur behind flimsy jargon that carries on for hundreds and hundreds of pages, large enough for me to be more interested in killing someone with the book, rather than find out who killed whom in the book. This is the lexicon of most classical authors; many of whom tend to make symbolism and analogies out of a flower, which makes me want to spit and wee on the daises pushing up out of their graves.' He paused for a moment to light a cigarette, still mumbling incoherently, before he reconvened his stem-winder of a speech at full force. 'I've already deduced who the killer of the immensely wealthy mother is. She was a right piece of work, that character, but she snuffed it quite early in the book. She was the matriarch of a large and madly eccentric family that had been revealed to be indulging in sensationalised debauchery that fell just a little too flat for my liking. You see, the distressed and incestuous son keeps enquiring about why and how someone could kill his poor lover/mother instead of when, whilst simultaneously and subtly alluding towards an alleged murder weapon found stained with blood in the fireplace ... I state alleged murder weapon because he has coerced the detectives into treating it as an attempted murder and abduction, causing for them to assume the woman was knocked unconscious with the blunt object so that intruders could kidnap her to hustle ransom money from the family in exchange for her safe return. This is altogether a terribly incorrect approach. Her favourite brooch has been nicked. Kidnappers do not take possessions as trophies; killers, however, do.' Trevor ripped the second half of the book out and threw it across the room for it to land on the carpet like a broken bird. 'I cannot be bothered to continue on just to reach the oedipal conclusion and have my theories validated—from their blatant mother-and-son love affair being exposed to her corpse being discovered buried alive underneath the new lavender bush. All because the son wanted to claim his inheritance early so he could run off to Sri Lanka away from her overbearing presence with the stableboy who'd bedded them all.'
'That was my book.' Frankie groaned.
Trevor glanced up at him as he dropped the first half of it at his feet, rubbing his hands together as though to cleanse them of the filth they had just held. 'Then you're welcome, you filthy prune. It was complete and utter odious drivel.'
Trevor strode back up the stairs towards the bookcase opposite the bed and returned to sit beside the tub, crossing his legs on a chair facing Frankie and opening another volume to read as the other boy soaked himself. 'I left an excellent book on your pillow to replace it, which you will simply devour. It's called Interview with the Vampire by a wonderful writer known as Anne Rice. Such a delightful read. It felt as though as I was reading a history textbook about one of the many past lives walked by our ancient souls. You will enjoy it tremendously.'
Prodded to freedom by a poker, they listened to the fire roar an angry song as it survived its suffocation and the leathery sounds of Hamilton turning pages as the time passed. When the afternoon light began to darken considerably, Trevor, puffing excessively on another thin black cigar, emitted another dissatisfied groan. 'This Gatsby fellow is an obsessive simpleton seeking the dullest of treasures, and this Daisy Buchanan girl is as shallow as a sink, as vapid as a used condom, and I've seen more spine in a coat hanger. I'd like to say that she reminds me of our Seraphina Rose, but I cannot, as I have never been a merchant of dishonesty. At least our Rose in the garden has a zoo full of gumption in her boots and carries her own umbrella, no matter how naturally vexing she is. Are you aware that she had a pivotal role to play in the Brixton riot back in April?'
'I quite like Gatsby—something childish in his nature. And you've only just voiced what Fitzgerald intended to convey. Now, are you just going to denounce every piece of literature, great or wilted, that is presented to your eyes,' Frankie muttered as he twiddled his toes against the curve of the bath on the other side, 'or is it that you just enjoy hearing your voice so much?'
'Give me the macabre. Give me the gothic. Give me the immoral. Give me the morbid. Give me such twisted horror that I begin to cringe and writhe. The thriving of the cruel and the vile, and the death of the mundane and the virtuous. Shock me with things that most writers are too cowardly to portray—be it seedy or improper. I have no need for the glitz and the glamour of stories retold over and over again, and hidden behind the code and conduct of beauty. Perhaps ... just perhaps we don't rub the dust and soot off of the utmost decadent characters as the story progresses to have a diamond shard shine through underneath. Give me Poe, give me Lovecraft, give me Shelley, give me Stoker, give me King, give me Matheson! Now, those men and women have and had a spoiled set of steel gonads. Tell me stories left untold about the corrupted origins of a villain's rise, documenting his legacy to his undefeated end. Whisper to me dark and grim fairy tales unexplored after bedtime, where happily ever after is but a dream within a fantasy. Let me come along into a tale about the darker passions and most sordid endeavours for dissipation. Twist my guts until I'm at unease, wherever that immeasurable limit may be,' Trevor announced darkly and fervently. He lowered his hand like wings balancing on a dying wind before he pitched the book away from him so that it slid under a dresser. 'Though, perhaps there is a chance that I do enjoy the sound of my own voice from time to time, too.'
'Brilliant,' Frankie murmured. 'An orator who has found the ideal audience in himself.'
Feeling playful, Trevor bent down and dipped his fingers into the hot water of the tub and gave it an inspiring twirl much like how one would tickle the peachy flesh of a bared lover with roving hands. 'You enjoy acting as an audience member for my speeches when they take ahold of me and come clambering up my throat to create tremors. You relish in the image of rising up to achieve the greatness and the grandeur that I inspire in you; therefore, we both play as ideal audience members to a rather brilliant orator,' Trevor uttered quietly, his dangerous tone, uncrossing his legs to then cross them again in the opposite direction.
'I don't have a choice when it comes to situations like these,' Frankie replied after he sunk beneath the water and emerged moments later. 'When I am compromised.'
'Let us refrain from discussing how sensational I am in much and more and leave it for another night when we have red wine at hand. Instead, as tedious as it is, we shall converse about your moderate accomplishments or potential thereof for now. How did the mission go with our dear little record keeper?'
'That prudish bookworm,' Frankie moaned, reflecting on the objective executed the day previous. 'Unfortunately, I am not to be the flavour desired by his pernickety taste buds.'
'Oh.' Hamilton's eyes widened somewhat with surprise. 'I was so certain you would be. I hadn't even bothered to carry out that extensive an investigation or set any further surveillance on him to uncover a third angle to come at him from. I considered him to be an easy target due to my understanding that the last extraordinary night he'd been shown previous to this last fortnight, and long before he begun scheduling marital missionary, was leaving his mother's cervix. Oh well, Carrozza, you can't be everyone's cup of tea.'
With his hands clutching the rim of the bath, he hoisted himself forward with a cigarette held tight between pursed lips for Hamilton to light it with his own, and then as he reclined back, Carrozza begun to recapitulate the entire ordeal.
Frankie had entered the dusty and musty back office, a room hidden at the back of Eton and used to store the school documents, late in the afternoon the day before. He'd been sent on a mission: to execute the eradication of his personal records so that once the slate was wiped clean, they could build a new structure on the demolition site to carve a more suitable image of him from scratch. However, the office was guarded by a young bookish man, who might just have been comely enough after a pint or two of stout.
Feigning an excuse about waiting for a lift, Frankie had sat on the edge of his desk and discussed the latest cricket game with him, all the while slowly sliding closer to his target decked in a sweater vest. When the opportunity arose, with the man rolling his creaky chair forward, Frankie offered himself up on a plate by subtly widening his knees to form a chalice, bored enough that day to be willing to participate, as he stretched this arms far enough to bare the band of his underwear. However, when he put his foot up on the chair between the man's legs, his eyebrow had rocketed upwards quizzically, and he begun to question the true intentions behind his appearance.
Taken aback and quickly understanding that his proposition made to attempt to swindle the man was foiled, no longer able to attach a string to the puppet through gratification, Frankie implemented the backup plan. From the back of his trousers, he produced a brown envelope and dropped it onto the desk. Suspicious, the man ripped it open to find it filled with snapshots documenting the scandalous activity that he had been engaged in with the school matron on the very desk Carrozza was perched upon. As Frankie lit a cigarette beside him, the man bent forward over the scattered display, his face blanching from shame and horror as he rubbed his forehead with a hand weighing down heavily from the gold band wrapped around his finger.
'Status update of my records: a clump of ash on a desk, like the remnants leftover from a phoenix birthed anew,' Frankie declared victoriously. 'Mind you, you have to pity poor Gavin Renford, with his thick black glasses and his ghastly oversized cardigan hanging over the rickety chair like a streak of sick, he couldn't quite remember his words when we burnt them together with the polaroids, and he probably still can't at this hour of the following day.'
'Very good.' Hamilton smiled, yet it always looked like a sneer. 'I'm very impressed. You ought to be rewarded.'
'I still don't understand why you didn't want me to burn your records folder along with them. The chance had presented itself,' Frankie continued, disregarding his quip about a guerdon as though he hadn't heard it. 'Alas, I am absolutely certain it was stuffed with enough paper to make the Forest of Dean shiver with apprehension from fearing what mischief you might brew over what remains of the year.'
'I enjoy the sloppy black stains and sticky ink inside my hefty and misshapen folder. And between you and I, Carrozza, I'm striving for my very own cabinet,' Trevor murmured as his hand roamed the water. 'We need only yours to be compiled into the most compelling read. Considering the rudiments, with its structure carefully built on a well-thought-out frame, it will become the grandest and most ambitious piece of architectural work for miles around. I intend to make it the most lavish masterpiece worth being strung up upon the walls of this museum. Now, when are you getting out of the tub? I feel like dear Florence Nightingale attending to you at your bedside. Furthermore, I'm becoming dreadfully bored of your willy looking back out at me like a coral-reef sea cucumber poking between the plants. Get out and we'll take LSD whilst watching David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.'
'I'm undecided. I'm neglecting to make that commitment as it means I will have to drag the tub back to where I stole it from. Soon, I'd imagine, as my fingertips are truly beginning to resemble raisins.'
'I could join you.' Trevor grinned and put his cigarette out in the water, much to Frankie's distaste. 'Care for a celebratory fumble?'
Frankie pushed the meandering hand away from his thigh and stood up. 'Bring me that towel.'|
Trevor stepped around to the fireguard and lifted up the towel to carry it back to the other side of the tub, proceeding to walk into the middle of the floor. 'Come here and step into it.'
'I honestly loathe you at times, you don't know the half of it,' Frankie muttered bitterly. 'I genuinely wonder why I have remained your friend for all of these harrowing years sometimes. Curse you, Hamilton, for being my curse!'
'The human soul loves to hate. It feeds off of it like a parasite. It is the preferable beverage to the consumption of love it ingests from another source. Now, come to me,' Trevor replied silkily, spreading the towel out like a matador.
Stark with confidence, Frankie stepped out of the bath and marched towards Trevor with a ferocious frown budging out a stern brow, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind and sodding the carpet. When he neared him, Trevor sprung back as Frankie snatched out for him. His grin arrived black-hearted as he hopped out of reach around the room like a vindictive imp from a folk tale.
'Are you sure you want to challenge me, boy?' Trevor jeered, sniggering before he jumped off the armchair to dodge Carrozza's lunge. 'The secrets I know about you that no other knows could leave you in ruins if I was to repeat them. You're a far cry from the young boy I remember wearing baby blue pyjamas covered in winsome yellow rubber ducklings to bed.'
'It's unsettling to think how even then,' Frankie retorted breathlessly, 'yours were matching black-and-purple ones dotted with skulls and bottles filled with lime green poison.'
As the harum-scarum game ensued, with Hamilton springing through the air each time Frankie plunged his hand through it, mischief gave way to malice once Frankie lost interest in the towel. Fraught with frustration after slipping on a pair of shoes and underpants, when he had caught Trevor at last, he shoved him into a cabinet. Hamilton only unleashed a cruel cackle to the roof before bouncing off like a leprechaun skedaddling away with his pot of gold, which angered him all the more. Fury swelled inside him, hot like dragon fire confined behind his ribcage, and before he could prevent himself, his palm shot out and formed into a fist midway to punch Trevor, causing him to stumble to the floor onto his hands and knees.
As Hamilton rubbed the trickle of blood from his nose on the backs of his fingers, he only laughed manically again. The towel was thrown aside, forgotten, as he leapt at Frankie and the boys tumbled across the carpet like tumbleweed pushed with a gust. Fists pounded into each other's bodies like meat tenderisers, conjuring aggressive grunts and groans from one another as globes and drawers were shattered apart once dragged into the fray.
They rolled each other onto their backs, slamming one another into the hardwood as they contested for the upper hand. Breathless, Carrozza straddled Hamilton and pinned him to the floor with his knees. His fist pumped like a piston as he hit him with a light jab on the jaw before he was bucked off and pressed against the cool wood. Trevor panted on top of him as Frankie dropped his head backwards to glance out the large windows overlooking the garth behind him, wary that anyone in the right position could glance across the corridor opposite to see the half-naked wrestling match. He redirected his gaze to Trevor, who was bearing down on top of him with his skeletal hands clenched tight around his forearms to restrain him, their lungs inflating and deflating against one another as they craved for oxygen.
'Here we are then, demon,' Frankie panted, feeling a trickle of blood vein down his smeared mouth. 'Alas, a pair of connivers held up in our lair alone with nought but our sins for company. What of us then when our plan is through?'
'Indeed, my wretched angel.' Trevor groaned, his eyes alight with fire as his hips slowly gyrated against him. 'Alas, we four shall remain such Bright Young Things, Francesco Carrozza; and these violent things have violent means for tragic ends.'
'Nobody calls me that anymore,' Frankie responded austerely.
As he lowered himself down, Hamilton replied, 'Am I nobody to you?'
The metallic taste of blood bloomed in the kiss, jagging their mouths like thorny roses.
'Frankie?' A familiar knock of knuckles rapping the door followed soon after. 'Frankie Carrozza, are you in there? Are you decent? I'm entering regardless, so any activity you might be up to that would displease God, the parish, and the eyes of myself and your parents then you've got until I remove my hands from my sight to withstand listening to the Devil.'
He could hear her affectionate giggle as she danced her way into the bedroom until half of her body was dangling around the corner of the door. He was sitting on his bed, a hillside of pillows angled beneath various parts of his body. Interview with the Vampire sat propped open on his chest like a steeple as the girl peeked between her fingers. Half-swallowed by the edge of the door she was clutching, and wearing that extravagant and explosive smile, it began to waver as she pulled her bottom lip down into a comical wince. 'Are you still ever so cross with me?'
'Bethany Holiday, if there ever comes a day where I do not find you in the next one, then I shall know that I am lost. When has our arguments ever lasted this long? You ought to have known that my unjust anger had subsided in less time it took for you sweep out of here haughtily like a bulldozer.' Frankie stuck a bookmark between the pages and set it on the bedside cabinet with considerable difficulty, suppressing a wince himself. 'You seemed to have vanished quicker than a magician's assistant after the disagreement ... and for an entire fortnight, too. Although miffed with your absence, I was also quite impressed. It is the end of September and you should have been learning how to combat the world over in Marjorie Devereux's Academy for Girls, may they be producing frolicking or frivolous or formidable ladies. Have you finally begun participating in a more extreme case of mischief than what you're accustomed to? Have I inspired you to finally indulge impulsiveness, enough to make you abandon your academic routine momentarily for revelrous purposes elsewhere? If so, it was a magnificent piece of espionage, for not even I could find you.'
Yielding a smile and rolling her eyes fondly, she said, 'Several weeks ago, an unconventional invitation had been delivered to me due to my, and I quote, "exemplary schoolwork," so I had went off to garner a spot of field experience with a rather prestigious research facility after receiving permission from Marjorie Devereux's Academy to be allowed to conduct studies into my thesis and gather together a hypothesis on my dissertation, which you had a help in after your philosophically nonsensical discussion with Trevor.'
'Which was? Amongst our hogwash and poppycock and balderdash and blatherskites, we all tend to cover quite a large variety of topics between us ... with the majority of the bailiwicks being quite controversial.'
'I shall put it much more delicately than you two had,' she replied, still stretching the top half of her body around the door and balancing on the handle. 'The discussion was on the psychological conditions involved in the human impulses in response to actions they may potentially be prone to had they had a clone created of themselves, and if they would develop a relationship with their secondary self ... that is to say, if they would ... um ... test drive themselves to learn everything there was to know about themselves that they wouldn't have the opportunity to do so otherwise. They called something associated with me exemplary! Can you believe it, Frankie?'
'Without a shadow of a doubt,' he replied nonchalantly, picking at a fingernail. 'After all, you are exemplary.'
Beth had always been several years ahead of her academic career. She had planned to study her dissertation for university years before she was even attending one. This was the benefits of cleverness when one had an IQ level well over 130—the lack of prohibition and the enthusiastic encouragement from the school they attended. This, however, was foreseeable in her from a very young age; she had read Finnegans Wake by James Joyce when she was twelve-years-old and had composed coursework on it with a clear outline of what she'd believed the meaning was behind it; and she had also begun studying for her Certificate of Secondary Education exams when she was a first-year in Marjorie Devereux's Academy. Truth be told, when she was six-years-old, she was already practicing being ten.
'Sounds about right. Oh, I remember now. That was the night we had brandy and played bridge.' Frankie laughed before his face brightened with interest. 'What were the responses from Trevor and I?'
'That you would promptly ruin yourselves,' she replied curtly. 'Frankie, about that argument, never would I ever have imagined you would react so abhorrently over being compared to Trevor. After all, the boy has been your longest friend.'
'Remind me again, what actually entailed that night?' Frankie asked, lighting a cigarette. 'When it comes to arguments with you, I quickly cast the reasoning behind it out of my head alongside all other nonsensical and needless information I don't require anymore, like how to pilot an airplane or the routes to take to get to Cheddar village, to make room for such things as seventeen different methods to tie a knot and which wild berries are edible, rather than carrying out what my common undertaking would be, which, depending on how aggravating the argument was, is where I cast the relationship out for good, instead. Mind you, the latter is something I would never ever consider with you. I think ... because when it concerns you, I have never been very good at being right. You're a thorn in my side, Holiday, a rib in my cage.'
'Quite right. No, you're not. You're much too hot-headed, too stubborn to completely consider what the other person has said, prone to internalised tantrums, too prideful to accept defeat, and you get too emotionally flustered to be able to develop a rational argument more often than not,' Bethany retorted, offering a smirk. 'You'd realise you're exceptionally brilliant if you didn't try to exude such intelligence without thorough backing. What I mean to say is ... your attempts to sound clever cancels out your actual true cleverness.'
'Whereas Hamilton is naturally eristic. Are you quite certain you don't want to be using me as your subject on a podium to study for your dissertation? You seem to have mentally jotted down the blurb of a psychological evaluation on me already.'
'You'd be perfectly suited, especially considering how you talked so devotedly, so romantically, and, frankly, so rather crudely about how deeply you would commit yourself to your cloned copy through various acts and arts. But alas, I don't think it would be wise to have my word count stretch so far; you make for are a compelling case to be studied under a hypothesis that would be broad enough to fill a filing cabinet. Oh, and I don't know if I'm brave enough to go into detail or venture any further from where I have been in your mind thus far in fear of losing myself in there.' She bit her smile to mock him as her lithe body made its way around the door finally to free herself from being trapped in the limbo between threshold and room. 'I've brought you a present from my days away as a token of my apology and appreciation for your heart currently pumping. I caught sight of it in a quaint little old thrift shop in the Cotswolds and instantly thought of your cheeky face and had to have it for you to have it. Be an outstanding host and put on the teapot and I'll refresh your memory and tell you all about our silly little tiff.'
Eager, he made to move from his bed, letting out a low groan as he clutched his thigh once a dull pain jarred the muscle and other aches sprouted across his body to dance in wretched revelry across it. Defeated, he unleashed a painful wince and slumped back down on the bed amongst the ocean of pillows.
'Whatever is the matter with you?' she enquired with a pebble size of concern as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed to put a hand on his knee. 'Have you overstretched and injured yourself from rowing? How many times am I to tell you now that it is absolutely ridiculous how much you're overexerting yourself just to triumph over your fellow peers?'
'I can handle it. I can handle all of it. And that's rich coming from the girl who just returned from a research facility where she studied for an exam she won't even be taking for a few years yet,' Frankie retorted defiantly, clenching his teeth down around a grimace as a jolt shot up his spine and sent him into the throes of a painful spasm. She loosened a noise of disapproval as she went off to boil the teapot. 'The sports are entirely manageable! Look at me, Holiday, I'm in spry condition and a picture of good health!'
'Picture of good health, you say? You look like you're being electrocuted. Well then, what was it this time?' Beth asked upon her return as she set two mugs of tea down on the shelves behind them, carefully placing his just centimetres out of reach to expose just how unmanageable his current state was due to his inability to grab for the cup without experiencing a backlash of stiff aches.
Strained, Frankie cleared his throat as he sat up rigidly and discovered newfound interest in the tea she'd handed him. 'Wrestling.'
Her smock dress fell around her beautifully. The skirt was dappled with floral patterns, snow-white flowers and vibrant pansies that seemed to have latched onto her like hitchhikers as she went fleeting through the fields. It hugged in to her chest and sides like a lamp before spilling down over the bed like a tide as she hopped up beside him. A constellation of freckles dashed up her arms and pitter-pattered across her nose from spending her summer in France. She was an English rose, with the colours of the Union Jack blooming from her features; the aqua blue of her eyes were as bright as the fjords in Norway, her white teeth were necklace of pearls, and her wide, pillowy, and cherry-coloured lips resembled poppies in the meadows.
'I suspected a scuffle. There is a stand-alone mirror and a chest of drawers down in the living area that has been shattered to pieces, and I feel a board at the bottom of your bed beneath me that has been broken asunder. You boys and the sorts of perilous commotions you find yourselves entangling the other in,' she chided, somewhere between disapprobation and amusement, as she reached across to massage the back of his shoulder. He pressed his weight against her, eager for the relief her talented hands would bring, breathing in the floral scent of her perfume and feeling the tickles from her long autumnal-coloured hair flowing over her shoulders and his in thick torrents, a shade darker than red velvet cake.
'Don't you even dare try and act all high and mighty like the Queen mother with me, young lady. You were nowhere near resembling a member of the monarchy on the fateful day I met you, Bethany Holiday,' Frankie snapped jokily before he took a sip of tea, soothed as she kneaded her fingers down his spine to flush his body with gooseflesh. 'Ah, borne back to yesteryear and fonder days. There you stood, a lifetime ago, Beth, swaying by the garden gate in the Anglesey Abbey in Cambridge, dressed in a green pinafore with a bright yellow bow in your hair, bringing to mind the colours of emerald trees and sunshine. You were a little tot posed politely with your hands clasped together in front of you, looking up to each adult as though you understood every word. I felt compelled to heave a handful of muck at you in your new Sunday dress, which suddenly escalated the garden party into an uproar, as though it was an act of terrorism ... your aunt and my mother herself were screaming up a riot, though both deny it today and accuse the other. However, rather than to squeal and stamp your foot into a tantrum over the besmirched ruins of your dress, you had scooped up your own soggy fistful and thrown it back to splatter it over my good tweed blazer ... just before you wrestled me through bramble into an overgrown ditch.' Frankie titled his cup as a gentleman might do with a top hat and said, 'Pretend all you'd like, Holiday, with your eloquent tongue and sitting there in your pretty dresses and lavish earrings, but you're just as much a ruffian as the rest of us. You're nothing but a little rascal with dirt in her desires and grazes on her knees.'
'You professed you would marry me that day,' she whispered quietly, lost to wistful memory as a fond laugh underlaid her words.
'Well, you did become my utmost best of friends forever after. What other sort of arrangement would trump that? he replied as she recoiled away to the bottom of the bed and he sat up against the pillows. 'What was this abrupt bump in the road of our great friendship a fortnight ago, then? Help me recall.'
She composed herself on the bed, pulling her feet up beneath her and interlinking her fingers around her frog-shaped mug of tea. 'We were sitting down those steps near the fireplace and, having run out of conversational steam, we spent most of the evening reading together—I, my Emily Dickinson, and you, your Robert Frost—after we spoke a great deal about your specific knick-knacks on your shelves once I'd noticed several had been added and removed. You had then gone off to sort them and your books out, stuffing all the ones you didn't read into a box with your collection of comic books.'
'You'd said that after all these years I was still the most puzzling boy you'd ever met,' Frankie interjected.
'I did ... and quite right. Mostly because you were also throwing out books you hadn't even cracked open the spine of as of yet, as well as books you have read and used to frequently read. I'd reprimanded you for throwing out all of your stories you'd read as a child, too, because I believed they'd become cherished in years to come, and that is something you do not discard. It was an unlawful literature genocide.'
'I'd shoved the box across to you and told you that you could have them then if you so wished.'
Beth pulled a patchwork quilt down over her legs and combed a hand through her hair. 'You told me that you were no longer going to indulge in anything that would not propel you forward respectfully; for if you were to read the same old tales over and over again, or anything that didn't expand your thinking, you'd be stuck. You wanted your literature collection to be on various topics, such as: political and strategic warfare, memoirs documenting the climb of the most powerful and prestigious individuals, imperial rises, and anything you'd described as useful information like that book about hypnosis, which, personally, I thought to be an odd choice. You had then taken that moment to quote from Julius Caesar, Tolstoy, and Alexander the Great rather admirably. It seemed you didn't have much room on your shelves for imagination that stretched into the fantastical anymore. However, you did keep your collection of Sherlock Holmes books for thoughts on deduction—or, rather, so I came to believe.'
'That's right. Clever man, our Sherlock. He never misses a trick, that one. Everyone could do with taking a page out of his book,' Frankie replied, stretching out until his bones cracked and released him of his pain, somewhat. 'I wasn't starting a tirade against fiction and imagination. I wasn't meaning to sound like a tyrant against literature. You won't find me participating in book burning anytime soon. I enjoy and applaud imagination pouring out the fantastical, but I don't want to feel nice and cosy come winter and the fire ... I want to learn. I wanted books that would utilise me instead. I am done with fairy tales for the time being. I wanted something that would challenge my mind. I wanted something that would reshape my mind or broaden it further with fruitful knowledge at the very least. I want to study something more than heroic optimism, focus more on the direction I was headed in, to wander an orchard filled with studies documenting successes and successions. I didn't want to be diluted with childish fantasies anymore. Childhood has ended, and we now have entered that lawless nuance between it and adulthood.'
'Which is when I declared that you were beginning to sound quite a bit like our dear friend, Trevor Hamilton,' Beth murmured, prodding him. 'And then you set off on a spiel, aghast that I could even dare think such a thing, never mind suggest it ... which is absolutely ridiculous, as a shred of you will always rub off onto those you're closest with until you meld together. I didn't quite understand why you seemed to see it as such a terrible thing. It must have been something to do with your current metanoia: an eager transition into adulthood. You seemed to me a child somewhere caught between deciding upon day or night.'
'I remember now.' Frankie nodded pensively, looking off towards the candle spluttering on the table opposite as Piano Man by Billy Joel drifted up the stairs from the radio. 'I didn't want to seem as tragic as Trevor Hamilton; tragic in the sense that Hamilton is crooked and dark only because he had the most perfectly idyllic upbringing. Our Hamilton read too many heavy books ever since he was barefooted, you see; stories about flayed hearts and marred souls, crippling him with the profound realisation that he has no rightful claim to own such a thing. He has no pivotal moment in his mind's memory to carry around proudly with him to declare it as the very moment to have blackened his heart so. He has gained no great and sordid corruption or crucially painful memory from childhood to coronate him in his prickly crown made of misery. No sorrows worthy to make it immorally acceptable for him to wander the forbidden. He is the carpenter of his life, decking himself in a grandiose cape of devious fire and deathly shadow, yearning to be as tragic and as melancholic as all the lives he'd read about. He wanted to be birthed from morbid gore to grow from gruesome macabre ... rather than a mortal bore in a toothsome house under candelabra.' Setting his mug down beside his snow globe, Frankie shrugged his shoulders and sighed before rubbing at an itch under his nose. 'The very pitiful and painful truth of it all is this: the poor fellow was born from jubilant love and blossomed in the sunny ports of seaside towns with bright summers filled with ice-creams, peaches, beaches, handholding, and unadulterated parental adoration and devotion. He has no focal moment to claim as the source of his decay ... no mildew to show where he began to rot. He has been quite successful in painting a vibrant red, thorny, and dewdrop-soaked rose into one of that with crimson bloody tears clinging to petals as black as raven feathers with its stem wrapped in barbed wire. That on it's own, I suppose, is as tragic as the broken legion he has read about and admired. He is a paradox. He is tragic only because he isn't tragic.'
'I remember him as a child. He was much too precocious and so terribly self-aware. He reminded me exactly of that little boy from that film we went to see at the pictures a few years ago. You, Seraphina, and I snuck into the theatre one afternoon when we were off gallivanting with our families through Dorset. Do you remember?' she asked, giving his bruised calf a poke. 'It was called The Omen, and it was about a boy named Damien. Now, that isn't to say that I think of him as the spawn of the Devil, but he was so very conscious of the unquestionable power he wielded over child and adult alike, and he had a great desire to be considered just as deviant, even in those younger days. He was constantly wearing black and grey clothes, the colour of coal and ash, over skin as pale as bone, along with that flat cap he fashioned on his head most days, as though he was masquerading as the ghost of a chimney sweep from the Victorian Era. He seems to have epitomised that sort of insidious behaviour quite well as the years progressed; as did the strength of his influence, yet I see through his dark façade all the same. I quite like his company. He is thought-provoking, if nothing less. He has been nothing but kind and respectful towards me, no matter how much Seraphina Rose thinks of it as him being as slimy as a slug.'
'I suspect he is keen on you, which is why he is sweet on you. I, too, enjoy his company most of the time. However, if you believe there is a redeemable quality to him, you ought to re-evaluate that assumption. By declaring that Hamilton wishes to be perceived as manically corrupted and darkly tragic isn't to say that he has just disguised himself as such. He isn't putting up a front or wearing a mask. Matter of fact, Trevor Hamilton is the portal of a black void into oblivion. Though, I'll utter no other disparaging word about him today in fear I'll say his name one time too many and accidentally summon him,' Frankie replied, redirecting his eyes towards the bare wall opposite, boring his eyes into the shelves and drawers. 'He is a good source of immensely impulsive fun and revelry, at least; which has always been my drawback. Mind you, never has there ever been an odder looking couple when you two stand side by side. It's like the nuance of dusk ... the moment day touches twilight, blending gold with violet.'
'You do enjoy painting people as decorative colours these days, don't you?' she teased. 'How very philosophical and dramatically aesthetic and artistic your company has been today. You're almost the archetype of a tortured Parisian artist.'
'Well, enough ramblings of that sort for today, my philanthropic maiden.' His head inclined towards the doorway. 'Where is my promised present?'
'Oh! Yes, of course! Right you are to mention it. Thanks for reminding me that I'd left it out in the hallway to be sure to cause a potential calamity,' she cried, leaping from the bed and sweeping out the door. He listened to her struggling on the other side as she dragged something large back in. When she had finished, she stood beside the gift with her fingers on her bottom lip and her apprehensive eyes studying him beneath a wavering smile. 'Well, do you like it? I thought it just epitomised you as soon as I set eyes on it from outside the shop. You've been mentioning it obsessively, constantly yammering into any ear that should graciously listen. Frankie Carrozza, the excursionist, the adventurer, who means to trot the globe. I thought it would be useful for you to plot out your travelling adventures on. I thought we could put it up here on this bare part of the wall above your chest of drawers just opposite your bed for you to look towards in the morning ... should your dreams inspire you. It was an absolute nightmare trying to get it here. Perhaps it is too silly of a purchase of me? Do you like it?'
Its ample frame shone golden, swirling into intricate designs made out of tree branches and boles. Behind its sheet of shiny glass was a very large and old illustration of the whole world, stained bronze with age and embellished with scarlet markings and sketches of vessels. His eyes brightened with admiration as they hopped across all of the countries and a coy smile turned his mouth triangular. 'Bethany Holiday, you gem of a girl,' he whispered, 'it is as beautiful and as brilliant as you are.'
'Oh fiddlesticks! Is that the time?' she cried as she flung her eyes towards the melting Salvador Dali clock on the wall and leapt to her feet. 'I was supposed to meet Aunt Floris for lunch at the Boston Tea Party ages ago!'
'Well, Beth, it is a clock,' he replied, as he made to get up from the bed to hang up the framed map. 'If you'd like, I could rearrange the hands of it to whichever time we prefer.'