The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

Carpe Noctem

The Crooked House of Windsor was a wonky 16th-century timbered house that had recently been converted from an antique shop into a tea room, lurching sideways like Britain's own narrow Leaning Tower of Pisa. The basement was said to have an arcane secret passage to Windsor Castle, an idea that had fascinated Charlie as he sat by the front window drinking tea and eating Battenberg cake, allegedly built to accommodate the romantic rendezvous between Nell Gwyn and Charles II—and to deliver produce from the markets to the kitchens, but those details were less sordid and so, therefore, less mentioned.
     Looking up and down the street in search of Seraphina Rose, Charlie declined another refill and checked his watch; she'd forewarned that she might have to deal with an "astronomical crisis", but had agreed to meet with him if she managed to wiggle out of it.
     Townies cluttered the table nearest, Norfolk jacket elbows poking out sharply from the mass of them in shades of rye, wheat, and barley. Their muddy boots suggested a day spent at the Royal Windsor Racecourse, large globs of it dripping onto chintz cushions. Obscured behind whopping clouds of smoke, Charlie overheard them discussing ideas for the next Great English Novel and premature memoirs, fox-hunting weekends, episodes of debauchery in country houses, and upcoming adventures at Oxford with the Bullingdon Club, an all-male dining club for undergraduates that is infamous for its prestigious members, grand banquets, boisterous rituals, and destructive behaviour, which typically ended in vandalising students' rooms and restaurants, causing many local outlets to refuse to host their events.
     After three quarters of an hour had passed, Charlie finally accepted that Rose was otherwise engaged. Donning his brown parka, he stepped out of the cosy tea room and into a chilly September evening. Yanking up his fur-lined hood, he made a beeline for the Windsor Bridge, a short arch bridge over the River Thames that bridged the towns of Windsor and Eton. He was dreading every footstep a little more each time the closer he got to Eton, racking his brains for another decent excuse to get out of helping Iggy rehearse for the Christmas play. After briefly considering remaining still, it was whilst he leapt aside to avoid being split asunder by a blazing cyclist when Charlie spotted the Rat King and several other poppers crossing the bridge towards him, sharing gulps from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and chucking empties into the river.
The idea that Peter Gillespie and his mischief of pouting prefects seemed in any way thuggish was laughable, but Charlie was beyond the sanctuary of Eton: he was out of bounds of protection from whatever cruel act of retribution they may wish to enact on him. Out here, in the fallow, unsupervised and unmerciful on the far side of Eton, their injustice was truly limitless. Tom Polks had been stuffed inside a postbox simply because he had the audacity to accidentally obstruct their path trying to free his bloody foot from the belly of a drain grate. They didn't find poor Polks until someone went to deliver a letter some thirteen hours later.
     Gillespie spied him: a slimy smile cut jaggedly up his cheeks, and his feet quickened. Charlie refused to run; he was loath to give them the satisfaction of seeing him scarper cowardly. The fight-or-flight response had been activated and answered when Charlie set his bag aside, pulling on gloves and flexing his fingers so that if he cuffed them he wouldn't shatter knuckles against sharp cheekbones.
A monstrous hiss sneezed near the foot of the bridge, a smog of smoke and the smell of petrol fumes perfuming the twilight. An orange-and-violet evening descended swiftly once the lamp posts flared with bright ideas. A pantomime of shadows cascaded down over Charlie on the pavement from the theatre stage forged out of the wide window of the vehicle passing him like a Punch and Judy puppet show. Stuck in congested traffic, the old red double-decker Routemaser bus was preparing to totter back into Windsor. Charlie was too focused on the advancing pack of dapper wolves to notice the haste of one silhouette, pushing through all those shadows heading in the opposite direction to exit via the wing beyond the stage curtains of the window. He was still ignoring the blurred outline until the open corner of the bus paused directly in front of him: a peachy hand extended from the platform towards him like the ringmaster of a circus offering him admittance to the show inside.
     'Come along,' Frankie called. Startled and dumbfounded, Charlie only stared at his grin. Looking ahead towards the dissolving traffic, Carrozza shook his hand at him urgently. 'Carpe noctem, Chance, before I pass on by you lost.'
     Once the double-decker shrugged back into motion, Charlie snatched his bag up whilst the wolves began to sprint towards their prey. Once at his heels, he took ahold of Carrozza's hand and was yanked to safety away from their glistening fangs and upturned snouts. The bus struggled over the bridge and out of the hunt.
Laughing and dashing up the aisle, they watched the foiled prefects kick over bins and stomp their feet beyond windows fogged with condensation as they slumped into seats opposite one another on the empty bottom deck.
     'Thanks for that, Carrozza,' he panted. 'By the skin of my teeth.'
     'I usually commit deviancy before noon, but I try to make a daring escape at least once a week.' Frankie smirked at him, leaning his back against the windowpanes and putting his feet together on the seat next to his. 'It would almost be sacrilegious to break my streak now after all this time, don't you think? And it wouldn't be worth it just to see you squirm. Not in a month of Sundays would I have enough of thrilling escapades and feats of espionage.'
     'Do you often find yourself in similar situations?' he asked.
     'I've my finger in too many pies on the best of days.'
     'Well, you can only imagine how much I didn't want to end up like Polks, who was popped into a postbox; or Felix, who was flogged, feathered, and tarred; or Hector, who was hounded and hammered with hen eggs; or Simon, who was showered in spiders; or Basil, who was basted in a bath of fat and banished from Baldwin's Bec.'
     'I'm sure some poor fellow in the following year would not like to share the same fate as Charlie Chance, who was choked on champagne.' Frankie winked. 'What's that you've got in your hands?'
     'Oh.' Charlie glanced down at the book that had slipped from his bag and onto his lap.
     'Wait! On the count of three, we show our hands,' Frankie demanded, shaking his own plump publication.
     'Fair do's,' he replied, feeling amusement tiptoe into his belly as he turned the book over to reveal the cover like they were playing a game of poker. 'Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl.'
     'Great writer, but the man in him was all the more fascinating. I met him when Mother and Father were invited to Gipsy House in Great Missenden last Christmas. For a man who shared my love for all things gritty and grisly, he followed whims like children do butterflies.' Frankie flipped his own hefty edition around. 'I'm reading War and Peace by Tolstoy. Not for the story as such, but to understand why some utter bore would ever wish for the former to result in the latter.'
     They slipped into a comfortable silence, swaying along to the vibrations of the bus as Windsor swept by, alit with life. Charlie faced the front and watched as the headlights gobbled up the town and exposed the nooks and crannies. Staring directly across the aisle at him, arms slung carelessly over the knees of his tight black jeans, Charlie became intensely aware of Frankie watching him, making him extremely conscious of every single expression on his face, every twitch of his body, every sudden movement; he felt the warm bulb in his throat sink and then protrude again like fruit bobbing along a swollen river whenever he swallowed. Ahead, a rainy spectrum, dashed in the colours of the night, shattered against the windscreen and splattered along the dark, steamy side windows, splitting raindrops into sparkling diamonds and tinting the glass in violets, blues, ambers, and greens like neon abstract art, causing the overhead lights to burn cherry-coloured like the red-light district of Amsterdam. Behind, the small rear window blazed like a heavenly portal from the vehicles tailing. The bus soared amongst the celestial cosmos, and they were the only passengers on board.
     With his eyes locked ahead, to poke the silence, Charlie asked, 'Where does this go?'
     'Next stop: anywhere and everywhere,' he responded. 'The magic of it is that any method of transport can take you evermore onwards if you'll but only take the first step outside. Before we double back to the location I intend to hop out at, we will play a game to pass the time. Tell me something profound, tell me two truths and a lie.'
     'Two truths and a lie?'
     'Two truths and a lie,' Frankie parroted. 'To show the way, I'll begin. I'll say three things, and you must deduce which of them are fictitious and which rings true.'
     'Alright.' Charlie pressed his back against the panes and put his feet up on the seat to mimic Frankie, who cleared his throat into a balled fist softly. 'Go on, then.'
     'Last night, I tricked the understudy into believing that I was the replacement for the actor portraying Dorian Gray in a rather racy and risqué production of The Picture of Dorian Gray down near the West End in London. It wasn't too difficult a role to inhabit as I've read the book countless times before; though, there was quite an immeasurable amount of improvisation involved in my part, but it only accentuated the naughty bawdiness of it all. Thank badness that I was able to replace the dreary old stiff cliff of an actor—and the understudy who was to take over, for that matter, as his hair stuck upwards like a fin, and his beak was the shape and size of one. They were both about as charming and as desirous as a bout of full-blown syphilis.
     'Then, for my second confession.' Frankie moistened his scarlet lips, a hand surfing through the waves of his limp curls like a wanderer pushing bramble, rhododendron, and blue hydrangea aside. 'To continue my quest through old haunts in search of someone I once knew in another life—'
     'A girl?' Charlie asked.
     'Oh yes. An ancient youth, wise beyond her years. After my performance last night, I took a late flight out from London to Amsterdam and fell in with some shoddy and fascinating characters—vixens, vagabonds, minxes, gypsies, and femme fatales—all as mad as a hatter, who ferried a jazzy Harlem down the canal on a narrowboat. Come this morning, I woke up in Efteling to children trying to waken "de slapende prins" under a giant toadstool, which I found most uncomfortable.'
     'Amsterdam?' Charlie murmured dubiously. 'Who and why would anyone go to Amsterdam for one single night?'
     'I would. Not only to hunt for an owlish old companion and to send her my love, but because it is always happening in the Dam.'
     'Apparently so.'
     'And finally'—Frankie lit a cigarette—'I am a collector: I hoard treasures, trophies, favours, and untranslatable and last words. Now it's your turn.'
     'Very well.' Once he'd thought long and hard, Charlie said, 'I'm obsessed with sincerity. Not honesty that's heard by the ear, but the pure essence and clarity of it when seen by the eye. Sincerity is the look of unmade beds in the morning and at night. It's when boys and girls are sloshed and crying and cannot be anything else but entirely truthful, when a drunk mind speaks for a sober heart. It's the soulful expression in the eyes of someone realising that they're falling in love—be that with another someone, a book, a song, a poem, a film, a place, or a quote. It's the way people look when they first wake up and have forgotten their surroundings for a moment—which, I believe, briefly offers a glimpse of what they might have looked like as children. Childhood, when candour was frank without thought, brutally said, but kindly intended. Genuineness is the agonised gasp someone loosens accidentally when their favourite character dies, holding back tears wherever they are. It's when people half-close their eyes and drift dreamily to somewhere beyond the clouds. It's in their laughs when they run into rivers, fields, forests, and beaches, screaming like they're seven-years-old again and it's the best day of their lives. It's the shame that vulnerable people feel when they're pitied, making them feel all the more unworthy and downcast. Above all else, integrity is in the eyes and smiles of those who rise above the worst thing that has ever happened to them when they learn that they're more than their sufferings. It's all the little things people show when they think nobody is looking.'
     'As do I.' Slightly taken aback, Frankie's eyebrows lifted. 'Now that you've put it into words. But does that monologue really fit the context of the game? It suggests that you mightn't, and that doesn't seem likely as it sounded very personal. You've made the task all the more easier.'
     'Have I? May it be the truth or a lie, it very much still counts as one, Carrozza. For all you know, I could be a bitter boy who utterly detests humankind and their stupid faces when they wake in the dead of night without need to masquerade as anything else but themselves. That, however, is for you to decide.'
     'Fair enough. I'll wait in much-anticipated suspense to find out whether it is.' Frankie smirked playfully. 'In truth, I do know one or two misanthropes.'
     'I'm fascinated by sunrises and sunsets and seas,' Charlie muttered, looking to his hand resting on the seat. 'And I have a six-year-old scar on my left shoulder from when my father shot me with his Lancaster pistol.'
     'Christ!' Aghast, Frankie's head shot up faster than the bullet from a Lancaster pistol. 'I dearly hope that that one is the lie!'
     'Correct.' Charlie smiled. 'The first one of yours must be the lie.'
     Frankie shook his head coyly, his teeth trapping his tongue.
     'Well, then how'd you get that love bite?' Charlie laughed. Assuming that Carrozza was a collector, his eyes skirted over the sallow violet blemish laid against the skin above his clavicle like a withered viola.
     'It isn't a love bite,' he argued, feigning offence and scratching an eyebrow. 'It's a bruise. I—I ... I knocked it off ... something.'
     'Off what, exactly?'
     'A mouth.'
     After they'd bottled their laughter, Charlie claimed all three of Frankie's tales were fabricated in turn, but he denied it.
     'Well, one of them has to be a lie,' he said incredulously. 'That's the name of the game.'
     'None of them are; that's my lie: that one of them would be,' Frankie returned, wiping condensation from the window to peek out between hands cupped around his temples.
     'They are all true?' Charlie blurted. 'Even your suggestive performance as Dorian Gray? While you're down there, pull the other leg to see if it has got anymore give, instead.'
     Reaching into his oak-coloured portmanteau, Frankie tossed a newspaper at him. 'The Daily Telegraph published rave reviews on my breakout performance as an "equally divine and demonic Dorian" on stage. They've crudely crowned me as an up-and-coming talent to watch out for—which, personally, I find is a rather presumptuous statement when they haven't even bothered to buy me a drink, yet expect me to stiffen for them, don't you?' Frankie stood and swung around the pole, turning back towards Chance expectantly. 'Well? Aren't you getting off this sinking ship with me?'
     Once Charlie tucked the newspaper under his arm, he leapt out after the boy when the bus returned to Windsor Bridge. Sunset peeked over treetops, flashing slices of its splendiferousness and outshining the lamp posts. To him, sundown always seemed a fantastical event that was always happening somewhere else, a magical place that was forever on the move, where only extraordinary things took place, where storybook things occurred, a realm that was always hurrying away from the human eye and just always about out of reach of the human hand and foot. He understood now, of course, that it was just another phantasmagorical occurrence that was occurring elsewhere. Surely this, what was happening right here and now, was just as special in some regard.
     Stuffing his hands into his navy peacoat, Frankie stepped closer to ask, 'Do you have anywhere to be anytime soon?'
     'No.' Charlie pulled up the hood of his parka, recalling how Iggy had insisted that he returned to Baldwin's Bec as soon as he'd eaten with Seraphina to help him rehearse. Perkins would surely understand his absence once he learned what had prevented and befell him. 'Not soon, anyhow.'
     'Come along, then. We don't have a single moment to spare, so no dawdling.' Frankie spun around speedily on stringy legs, and strode across the bridge like a constable tailgating a crook. 'I know of a place where we can go to roam and rule for awhile.'
     They were running, racing, chasing, as though to keep inside what was left of the day ahead and to delay the night snapping at their heels. Like magnetism, Charlie couldn't take his eyes off the boy hurrying over rocks, grassy mounds, and down the muddy bank adjacent to the River Thames as he scurried through the trees to catch up. Frankie ran like he was racing death and chasing life, the smoke of his cigarette clinging for a moment to the fences, the walls, the trees, and then evaporated. Like a dollop of whiskey in a hot cup of cocoa, he had a delightfully besmirched soul, wielded like a torch to banish the dark, and one could not bear to part from its enlightenment, to be left with what threatens in the shadowlands behind. He was all too much, not enough, and just right.
     Camouflaged in foliage, they unearthed Carrozza's punt in the woodland. Leaping into the role of the punter, Frankie stood on the till of the flat-bottomed wooden boat with a long pole in his hands that he used to propel them down the River Thames like an Amazonian tribesman hunting in the jungles. Pillowed by Frankie's coat against the square-cut bow as they drifted along the riparian, gliding passed swans and swerving narrowboats, Charlie was in awe of the boy's hands, large enough to easily crush both of his inside a single one, and artfully carved by his aptitude in sports. When he stabbed the water like he was spearfishing, they resembled gnarled branches—thick knots for knuckles, coated with pink, youthful, and callus skin. The sleeves of his mustard-coloured jumper, the same colour as the scarf that he wrapped tight into a headband and wore like a crown, were tugged back to expose prominent welkin-blue veins that glowed celestially, snaking over his forearms like ivy roots rising beneath earthy skin. They were beautiful. It was beautiful. He was beautiful.
     'Whom was this person you went chasing halfway around the world behind last night, then?' Charlie asked the Prince of Verona, breathing in the cool, metallic smell of the river and the smoky scent of autumn.
     'A human bonfire, one of those few precious individuals with fireworks for a souls, who burn bright like flares before dying. She was a legend, and she died like a dame beside me,' Frankie confessed, emitting a thoughtless sniff as he leant on the pole and saluted the canoe torpedoing passed. 'Godspeed, good sir. As you were!'
     'I don't follow,' Charlie muttered, his heart fluttering from something shiny like hope. It amused him greatly how Carrozza spoke in a somewhat magniloquent manner, as if he was constantly satirical and mocking his own language and its older tongues, blatantly emphasised for comedic effect compared to Iggy's and Seraphina's showiness. 'What do you mean?'
     'Though sparse, I'm drawn to these sorts of souls because they shine magically from a crowd like confetti on a black bedspread.' Frankie looked down at him as night tucked in around them like a blanket. 'Rioters, rebels, and revellers, adventurers and explorers with nonconforming hearts and never-commonplace minds that are driven by wanderlust and mayhem.'
     Lamp posts blossomed along the walkways like the fiery torches of tribesmen; night-time light blended into the steamy river until it churned like glistening oil; the moon shone above and beyond like a giant will-o'-the-wisp; and Charlie felt as though they were paddling towards a primitive ritual.
     'Say, those who run off to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Australia,' Frankie continued, his gravelly voice reverberating off the surface like a skipping stone. 'I can see these runaways, fleeing out after the sunrises and sunsets with only their youths and skin to burn. Come midnight, they'll eat miniature pies and drink milkshakes and apple juice on the hood of their Volkswagen buses and camper vans outside rusty petrol stations by dustier roadsides. I can hear them, bursting out into charming fits of laughter whenever they get embarrassed over butchering the Catalan language, brushing away long hair burnt bright by sunshine with skin cooked dusky like oak and dappled with constellations of freckles. Girls and boys in ever so short denim shorts, immodest, tatty, and sleeveless shirts slashed down the sides to expose sandalwood or bronze ribs, and rock 'n' roll logos imprinted on the front of the uniform. All of them wearing perfume and cologne and very little else. Infernal, feral hearts untamed and ramped, they'll go dancing in foreign pubs and nightclubs and parties until the break of dawn, swallowing tequila and gnashing pearly white teeth after spending their eternally summery days tanning shoulders, scarring bodies with beautiful ink that tell the secrets of their wanton hearts, and braiding feathers into their hair. Barbaric bohemians, the lot of them.' When he took a moment to wave to those on narrowboats that he seemed to know quite well as they hung their washing out or sat smoking pipes on the decks, Charlie wondered how often he did this. 'Starry-eyed and self-proclaimed gypsy royalty, who awaken perpetually with sand sprinkled over the thin cotton sheets of their tiny bunks. Those who march loyally after the gods they've chosen—The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Iron Maiden, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, KISS, Aerosmith, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Fleetwood Mac, Duran Duran, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Stillwater, The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Clash, Pearl Jam, The Cure, Led Zeppelin, Queen, The Kinks, Janis Joplin, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie, The Who, or whomever else they've followed religiously—and to kiss all the roisterous folk they can get their hands on without ever feeling the need to apologise.' Frankie sighed sombrely and glanced wistfully into the darkening heavens, entranced by wishful nostalgia. 'Those who are free, Charlie. For the heart is a wild and rambunctious beast, and that is why it must remain caged behind our bony ribs.'
     Charlie could've listened to him speak forever; compelled by that crackly grit in his larynx, if this river was to lead the way into infinity, then so be it. Amen. As he listened, he imagined himself running his finger down the spine of this book bound beautifully in bone, taut sinew, and faultless skin, written in rich blood-red ink. A ripple of pleasure and excitement and desire jolted across his shoulders. He looked up to see electrifying eyes in the night, bright like the tips of the lightning bolts of Zeus, the golden flecks in them like sunlight splitting the emerald leaves of his irises. He shepherded them along like Charon, the ferryman of Hades in Greek mythology, who carries the souls of the newly deceased in his boat across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the otherworld of the dead—but for a payment.
     What would this charge cost, Charlie wondered, as dark water rippled over the brim like syrup to cool his hands, as he leads us down into what could only be paradise, Elysium, Heaven, or Hell?
     'I only have one request from this world: to carry in my possession a very bruised and battered passport,' Frankie declared, his rusty voice equally as silky and as rocky as the Thames.
     They were far from land and culture, drifting on a country of their own.
     'Tell me some of your favourite last words,' Charlie said to keep the boy speaking, only so as to listen to the song of the harmonic hitch in his vocals and to hear his passions.
     'Look at her, lying there like Lady Muck and barking orders.' Frankie laughed. 'Very well. As you wish, Chance. There once was a man called Richard Beatty Mellon, a multimillionaire, a banker, an industrialist, and a philanthropist, as well as the president of Alcoa. He and his brother had a little game of tag going that lasted approximately seven decades. On his deathbed, Richard called his brother over to whisper, "last tag". Poor Andrew remained it for four years until he, too, died. When Sir Isaac Newton passed away, he was, I found, profoundly humble when he said, "I do not know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me". Personally, I found this rather poignant, and not at all how I want to depart: with so much left unexplored and unfinished.' Frankie scooped water up and they propelled forward, sheering over the silvery sheets. 'Sir Winston Churchill's last words were: "I'm bored with it all". This, I believe, is the only proper way to go. Sir James Matthew Barrie, who you'll know as the author of Peter Pan, said, "I can't sleep!" and then, of course, he did forever. Then you have Oscar Wilde's final quip, which my good friend Ciarán Quinn often quotes: "It would really be more than the English could stand if another century began and I were still alive". Karl Marx roared, "Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!", but, alas, he didn't say much more after that. When overhearing his nurse saying that he was looking much better, Henrik Ibsen commented, "On the contrary", then simply died.' Franke laughed again just as he had when he first heard it, before he cleared his throat and eased the boat to a standstill. He looked to Charlie, leaning his arms on the pole and prodding his forehead with a finger. 'I've a theory that our last remark often captures the utmost essence of ourselves. However, my most favourite final words were said by François Rabelais, who used his dying breath to announce: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps". They oft make me wonder, is it braver to face death head-on or to rage against the dying of the light?'
     'Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet,' Charlie said dreamily once he recognised the reference. Judging the look in the other boy's wilder eyes, he knew that he had the poem branded to his memory, learned by heart, and etched into his very soul like a promise, a secret, another tattoo.
     Frankie coughed into his fist, composed himself, and voiced Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night verbatim, before he continued the voyage downstream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Suspicious, Charlie considered the keen sense of purpose suggested in the underlining conviction in his deliverance, making him wonder what had the words mean so much to him as the recited poem descended like dusk and he coaxed them back to the banks, back to land, towards King and country.
     'What will your last words be, I wonder?' Charlie mused aloud.
     Frankie winked. 'Rather extraordinary, I'd imagine.'

*

'Tell me one more time,' Iggy demanded later that night, after insisting he answered how many times Frankie had given his eyesore up-to-no-good grins, 'specifically, where did he touch you?'
     'Oh, don't start.' Charlie humphed, leading them upstairs through Baldwin's Bec. Recalling feeling a swift squeeze of a hand in the divide between his leg and behind when he and Frankie separated from one another, Charlie snorted exasperatedly again; he had just spent twenty painful minutes trying to convince Perkins that Carrozza hadn't performed Chaeronea's handshake on him. 'It was barely a tap on the back of the thigh, and it didn't last the three seconds the gesture requires for it to be legitimate. He was being playful, humorous—admittedly, not exactly creative comedy. For all I know, he might have been trying to whack me and just about missed. Those boys grope one another all the time, and it's explicitly platonic—'
     'Until it's not, of course. Until it's to arrange sordid intentions by pinching each other's arses,' Iggy interrupted, raising his whisper above the warbles of a songstress streaming from a vinyl behind a bedroom door. 'Those were some fairly odd things to confess to a complete stranger tonight.'
     'To the starved heart and mind, I'm sure a boy like Frankie forever seems suggestive by the way he speaks or by the things he does,' Charlie argued, flattening himself against the wall to avoid the river of boys pouring passed on their way to harass Gillespie for the evening, giving each of their palms an encouraging slap as they went. Beyond the windows, the crimson-orange afterglow fled fast from the dark, scarping across the treetops and shrinking down behind the belfry, and a skulk of foxes, generations of them that had roamed the streets for as long as there had been boys in the houses, dashed from underneath the bushes to prowl the grounds. 'He was bored, and I was there. Nothing more.'
     Cedric Buckley swallowed up the dimly lit switchback stairs with his magnificent height. His wide shoulders and gangly limbs rose out of the side of the banister as he slinked around the corner like a rocky, monstrous fire-red creature slowly giving chase after them.
     'Charlie Chance?' he grunted as he approached, gunning a friendly finger at him, his doubtful tone suggesting that he was merely confirming his name. He rubbed a hand through the ginger hair sprouting like a streak of fire from his head, which all his hulking appendages were disproportionate to so that he looked like a caricature of Hercules. His features should have made him handsome, but he looked too menacing, his jaw too broad like his shoulders. Out of lessons, he was constantly dressed in sportswear no matter the season or occasion. He was, judging by the strain on his shorts and jersey, only one violent sneeze away from leaving himself as naked as the day he was born. Carrozza was branded by the school newspaper as "Eton's Trident", whereas Buckley was known as "The Fireball" due to his prowess and legendary tackles in rugby that had left, thus far, eleven boys in hospital. Despite sharing accommodation in Baldwin's Bec, different floors, social circles, dining arrangements, and orbits prevented—or ensured—that Chance and Buckley never spoke.
     'Bucks.' Charlie nodded his greetings as the ruby giant ambled passed, before subtly looking down over the banister and up towards the other floors, hoping that he wasn't about to end up like Gregory Plimpton, who turned up last year in the wilderness after being shoved half-naked down a pipe that carried him all the way out to an acre of woods outside of town for snitching on Carrozza and his gang.
     When Bucks disappeared into his room, Iggy raised a quizzical eyebrow.
     'Don't ask me.' Charlie shrugged.
     'Was he bored enough to mention you to his friends?' Iggy murmured. 'Perhaps it's for the best that nothing Wilde happened between you and Carrozza.'
     'How so?' Chance questioned.
     'Well, do you know what it is they say about Frankie Carrozza?'
     'That he's dangerous.'
     'Yes, but haven't you ever wondered why some blue-blooded public schoolboy with a white collar might ever be considered fraught with danger?' Iggy asked, leading them both back to their rooms. 'They say his ardour has the power to banish. Makes you wonder about poor Max Mayvolu, the macabre and woeful tragedy of Eton, who was hereby banished forever. You might wade out into the ocean of him ... to discover that there are sharks in the water.'