The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

A World Away

When the clouds eventually rolled in, a gruesome storm brewed overhead and prevented them from making the journey to the Azure Window on Gozo. In the cusp of the afternoon, the cold and grey and rain made outside look almost as black as night, and the torrential monsoon forced the boys inside. Charlie had only gotten used to the foreign smells, the warmth of the rain, and the humid heat in the heavy air when the temperature suddenly plummeted and took that all away. Convinced that the conditions of the weather was an unforeseen gift, he had decided to spend the day studying, and had long since given up trying to coax Frankie into doing the same. Since the other boy was much more resolute, despite the tempest skies, he wanted to take the boat out to sail it as far as they could—to outrun the grumbling clouds above until they hit sunlight or England again, or to find some other adventure, perhaps. With wills diminished by elemental forces, the kitchen was where they remained until evening, sitting at the dining table with the lights dim, the fireplace coughing under coals beside them, and textbooks and jotters sprawled across the tabletop like crooked gravestones. Each time Frankie glanced at the stone pool outside to watch miniature waves thrash and gorge on the froth spewing over the rim of it, Charlie had to tap his book with a pencil to drag his yearnful gaze from the rain-lashed windows and keep him from suggesting that they go surfing again. The thunderstorm had put Carrozza into the foulest mood: he was either being grumpy, bored, restless, or easily distracted. Much like a child, he was constantly trying to find any old game to play with Charlie, determined to do anything other than revise. Unlike Charlie, who had to work hard for it, Frankie did not need to apply much effort to his assignments to achieve satisfactory results. Unlike Frankie, Charlie couldn't afford to wing it, which was why he was determined to stuff as much learning as he could into the holiday, scribbling feverishly across the page with a finger securely pressed to a textbook to chase a sentence. He rolled up his sleeves and clutched a head that he'd crammed with equations, chemical compounds, theology practices, Latin phrases, and paragraphs from the Classics, silently praying that they wouldn't tumble out of his ears from another swift stroke of Carrozza's foot.
'That's enough cleverness from me for one evening,' Carrozza decided once true darkness swept in from over the trees and he'd thrown his history book over his shoulder onto the floor. Instead, he spent the rest of the evening balancing on the back legs of his chair and trying to tempt Chance into leaving his papers and books behind, too. 'Come on, Charlie! You're in Malta, for God's sake! Stop being such a swot!'
Charlie slapped his hand away from closing over his books. 'You haven't even so much as looked at your books, so I dunno where you're getting this idea of cleverness being used somewhere.'
'Darling?' High heels clip-clopped down the hallway like a horse cantering in the distance. The sounds of the footfalls changed significantly from the marble walkway once they marched over wooden floorboards. 'Darling, there you are. Are you absolutely certain that you two will be perfectly fine with being left alone for the evening?' His mother surveyed them as she clipped an earring into her ear. 'The idea of you being here alone tonight just doesn't sit well with me—especially tonight of all nights.'
'I'm not alone,' Frankie remarked as he looked over Charlie's work. 'Chance is here with me.'
'Oh, you know what I mean.' She scowled as she clipped in the other earring. 'We'll be at the Hamiltons, so I'm only just a telephone call away. Put this necklace on for me. And this bracelet. Oh, very funny. On me! I feel absolutely dreadful that this will take away from our time together, but I just can't find it in me to stay here on the night; I've made it as far as Malta on the date, it's the best that I could do, but I just can't seem to remain here on the day anymore. Darling, are you sure you'll be alright?'
'Yes, Mother. Don't be daft. As I've already assured you, many, many times since you announced that you were all leaving this morning, we will be absolutely fine. In fact, we will just be fine; we won't dare be anything else at all while you're away—not hungry, thirsty, excellent, tedious, or dead! We'll just sit at this very table like two corpses collecting dust until the very moment you return to us.' He didn't bothered to look towards her as he slowly passed his finger back and forth through the flame of a candle, but he did when she skilfully pushed his chair back down onto all four legs and gently slapped his own down off the table. 'We promise not to let in any blood-covered strangers carrying machetes as lodgers—that is, depending on what sweeties they offer, of course. And I promise not to burn the house down into a pile of ash either—that is, unless the insurance money is worth it. But what's the use in that if you and Father aren't inside it for me to also claim your life insurance and set myself up nicely as a successful lord of a Columbian drug cartel?'
'Is this really the time for such dark humour like that?' She wrinkled her powdered nose. 'It's ever so ... Liverpudlian.'
Frankie pointed to the black sky outside. 'These are dark times, Elena!'
'How I ever thought that you were such a fetching boy of high calibre once upon a time is beyond me. Remember, dear heart, ring me on the number pinned to the refrigerator—no matter the time of day or night,' Elena said as she prinked her dress and hair in front of the mirror, rotating her body and face side to side to scrutinise her appearance. 'And Charles, you remember that you can always run to the nearest town and we'll put you up in a hotel until we return on Sunday if my son gets a little too ... hyperactive, if you will. Lord knows he could test the patience of a saint. Now, give your mother a kiss.' When Elena lowered her face down by Frankie's ear, clutching the back of his chair like a gorgeous gargoyle, he placed his mouth to her cheek and blew hard until a wet, rude noise squelched insinuatingly. Scowling affectionately, she slapped him on the back of the head with her gloves and rushed back to the mirror, all the while complaining about having to reapply her immaculate make-up. Elena Carrozza pulled a fur coat over her milky shoulders, slipped her pearly hands into pearl-coloured gloves, and then looked out the window towards the thunderstorm, a brief chill shivering her spine. 'That storm has come on from the calmness like nothing normal. It isn't natural. If I was a mystic woman like your great-great-grand-aunt Estelle Edel was—she was a very famous seer from the Victorian era, Charles—I'd have taken it as an omen worthy of interpretation. Be good, boys.'
'And if we can't be good, then at least be good at it?' Frankie suggested.
Elena narrowed her eyes. 'I worry about you sometimes, you know.'
'Alone at last,' Frankie purred once he'd return from waving farewell to his family from the doorway. He closed over the textbooks, and Charlie surrendered. When the dog on the floor lifted his head from his paws and whined, he added, 'Well, of course, apart from you, Kevin.'
They retired to the living room, a large cream seating area that glowed from the technicoloured panels of a stained-glass wall, and set to watching an old western as they ate leftover cannolis, so deep into the house now that they couldn't hear the blustery winds shake the panes anymore.
'You didn't smuggle that over with you on the plane, did you?' Charlie asked Frankie when he returned with cannabis and a bong.
'Of course not. I've quite a bit of it stashed around the house since last year. If this place is ever raided by police, my parents are going to look highly culpable,' Frankie replied as he loaded the pipe.
When the film ended, they flicked through foreign channels in search of something translated into English. Defeated, they settled on Maltese soap operas and each picked an actor's part to interpret each line into nonsensical dialogue and laughed until their bellies hurt.
'It is an English delicacy, you impeccable dimwit of a doormat—such as is love, and other nonsenses.'
'Codswallop! Enough of this ridiculousness of putting raisins into cuisines that I would otherwise find enjoyable to eat, you precise pain in my rear.'
'You are being highly unraisinable.'
'How dare you make me hear that with my very own two ears.'
'Mummy! Mummy! I have the most urgent news to tell you from earlier today! There was an English cat named One Two Three, a German cat named Ein Zwei Drei, and a French one called Un Deux Trois, and they were all competing in a swim across the English Channel towards France. The English cat finished first, the German cat arrived second, and the French cat was nowhere to be seen. As to why you my ask, the answer is because the Un Deux Trois quatre cinq!'
After they shared another few hits from the bong, Frankie glanced towards him and asked, 'What's going on in that little head of yours right this instant?'
'I feel all ... floaty.' Charlie looked back at him, the boy seemingly indifferent to the victims being brutally murdered by the heinous killer on the television, and then to his foot being held by him in his lap. He smiled dreamily. 'I also feel ... like we're a world away.'
'As do I.' Frankie rubbed his foot affectionately. Biting his tongue between grinning teeth like a mischievous child, he then cracked the bones of it to make Charlie yelp. 'It feels nice, despite you bellowing unheard advice at these poor souls running amok on the TV. It doesn't feel like Malta; it feels like—'
'—ours.'
'Somewhere ours, a world away,' Frankie elaborated, then smirked. 'Let's go to bed.'
However, when Frankie led Charlie back to his bedroom, his impression and intentions were to follow him inside.
'God loves a trier.' Charlie chortled and shook his head. 'We shouldn't.'
'But we could.'
'We mustn't.'
'Cuss it!'
'It wouldn't be right!'
'It wouldn't be wrong either!' Frankie stared back at him bewilderedly. 'What sort of household do you think I live under? One in which they secretly set up cameras to supervise and spy from afar?' He placed both hands on the doorframe. 'This is 1983, Charlie, not 1984. I spent all morning hard at work secretly manipulating my parents and aunt into leaving us alone for a few days, and you're really going to let all that groundwork be for nothing?'
'Do you yourself not think it would be a bit disrespectful to lie together under your parents' roof?' Charlie asked, the slight pang of regret causing the words to sting his mouth. 'They're under the impression that I'm here as a friend.'
'You are my friend,' Frankie argued. 'And a very good one, at that. Tell me, what's so terrible about two friends lying side by side in a bed together? What's so wrong with the world that two boys can't embrace? I cuddle with my mates all the time.'
'You and your friends are weird though.'
'There is just as much intimacy between me and mine as there is between you and yours, Charlie.'
'I dunno, it feels just like fornicating on the altar would be like spitting in God's face, us sleeping together in this house—'
'But you said it yourself'—Frankie leaned down and pressed his forehead against Charlie's, who pressed back harder—'that we're a world away from here.'
He considered this for a moment. 'Trust you to find a way.' Charlie smiled. He tugged at the bottom of Frankie's t-shirt, his hands roaming to feel the firmness of either side of his ribcage. He touched the crook under his armpit, trailing his nails down his forearm to interlock their fingers together. 'You could cheat the devil out of a deal over your soul.'
'And I have done plenty of times before. Where there is a will,' Frankie replied, as Charlie invited a devil into the room. 'For a minute there, you were starting to make me miss Eton and Empyreal House rather terribly, where boys can be entwined together in the throes of passion beneath the throws of the bed without a second thought of sin or a thread of clothing.'
'You ought to get yourself your own island, Carrozza. One where morals are as loose as the sands between your toes on that exotic paradise, and where law is ungoverned by nothing other than your Grecian-like fancies.' Charlie laughed as he climbed into the bed. In the dark and in the silence that followed, he listened to the sounds of thickly padded skin thudding bare on wooden floorboards. Another body writhed in the sheets behind him, causing a cool draught to skirt up his legs to his back as the sheet fluttered to reveal him underneath and a knee weighed against the mattress. 'Sometime today.'
'Are you cold?' Frankie muttered, close enough to kiss. When a fierce wind howled like a banshee outside to shake the glass windows with immense strength, Charlie felt him disappear when he leapt from the bed again. 'Gimmie a minute.'
'I wouldn't be very cold if you'd just get in here.' He sat up to look for him in the darkness, wrapping his arms around the knees he'd drawn up to his chin.
Rustling and scratching shivered through the black, and then a match sparked into life to reveal Frankie by the fireplace at the foot of the bed. Once he'd finished coaxing the flames to blaze in the hearth, the slither of fire shone wonderfully off his skin, making it glisten like melted caramel. Still feeling the effects of the drug they'd smoked, Charlie sucked in on his bottom lip hard until it hurt, his heart gave a euphoric thump at the lubricious sight of Frankie, scantily clad in a pair of white briefs, and he wondered if there would ever come a day in which he would be unamazed by his beauty. Raw desire killed the next words in his mouth.
Frankie stood and smirked proudly. He then jumped onto the bottom of the bed and ran up it towards the other boy waiting. Laughter leapt from Charlie when he dived onto him with a great snarl, burying his face into his neck as he cast the covers over them both. Carrozza's body was roasting—forever summer warm, no matter the season. His larger build smothered Charlie like a sheet of heated silk, and they rolled and writhed over both sides of the bed together, giggling heartily and holding tight to one another to shoo away the cruel chill. Once warm, they lay side by side in silence for a spell. As they did, Charlie traced the outlines of the veins that throbbed along the back of Frankie's hand, mapping the intricate designs by sliding his fingers softly up his wrists, venturing along the forearm and under the groove of his elbow and over the river-blue lines that were evidence of his humanity.
'Can I ask you something?' Charlie asked.
'No,' Frankie answered sharply.
Charlie snorted. 'Dickhead.'
Frankie grinned. 'Go ahead.'
'What did you do last summer?' he whispered, both determined and reluctant. A subconscious fancy stirred in him: to finally lay to rest the immortal myth and expose the mortal boy lying forgotten underneath. 'What did you really get up to?'
'I flew to Ireland,' he said.
'Honestly?'
'Yes, of course! What would I gain from being dishonest?' He lit a cigarette and breathed in the smoke. 'Good ole Elena and Alex went off on holiday to either Corfu, Prague, or Buenos Aires—I can't remember which for the life of me, or if any of those are correct—and though I'd decided not to come with, I still sought summery adventures. And so when Margo left for Leicester for the weekend, I snuck off to visit Quinn in Cork after he sent me a letter that said nothing else other than to ask if I was going his way.'
Charlie took the cigarette from him. 'And?'
'We decided to pack his brother's red Austin Mini full of food, alcohol, illicit rations, and what have you, and then we took off in it on a road trip. We drove up through Galway, up along the hills of Donegal, and slept beneath the Dark Hedges, a picturesque and aesthetically pleasing place that is positively choked with these twisted trees like something out of a fairy tale pop-up book. Incredibly spooky at night, mind you. We walked the Giant's Causeway, too. And I'll tell you something, I half-expected to see Fionn mac Cumhaill rear his giant head from the depths of the sea and crawl towards the strangely hexagon-stoned shores and ancient cliffs every second we were there. I could tell you everything we did that summer, or I could summarise it with this: we travelled all the way along the coast to map out the outline of the Emerald Isle. The country is in the shape of a shaggy dog, you know, which I thought was very suitable.' As Frankie spoke, they stared at the ceiling as if they could see the stars beyond to count and name them, a short space placed between their two bodies. 'Surprisingly, we spent most of our time in this sleepy little town called Dungiven, which I've since found out means "Gevin's Fort" in Irish. We'd cruised along the rolling emerald and beige hills of the Glenshane and discovered it hidden there in the valley's belly like a folky secret. We sat atop a stile on the glens above the town and watched daybreak spill over it, slathering an ocean of great green mounds that rose like the backs of ancient giants a'slumber with dawn. Just beyond, behind the undiscovered town and above the faraway windmills, from upon our height we could see towards a gap in the sky. It opened like a window, curtained by the vale and cleared of clouds, an open space filled with a sunrise of a thousand colours—of creamy gold, of peach, deep scarlet, pale crimson, pink, amber, and the sort of honey-coloured colour of the honey you dollop on porridge in the cold mornings. We stared at that gloriously illuminated view as if it was a secret entrance into Heaven, and you easily could've believed it was, where we might've seen saints and angels and loved ones dancing in the sky as prettily as the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It was truly heavenly, Charlie. It was so powerful, that view of the landscape, so profound and so unlike anything that I've ever seen before in this life that I became a little teary-eyed by it—strange tears, ones that I had no term or proper reason for other than complete and utter absolution. With cigarettes clenched between our teeth, strong spirits coursing our bloodstreams, and our oldest sins cleansed from our bones, I could swear that we were at the very top of the world.' The boy sighed longingly, eyes drifting skyward. Frankie was lost to him now, bathing in the memory of that sublime sunrise. When he sniffed and coughed, he broke from the reverie of wistfulness and vindication into his cheery self again. 'And I tell you what, Charlie, we truly were at the very top of the world—well, of sorts—because we drank whiskey straight in a bar that was officially known as the highest pub in Ireland. Shortly afterwards, we drove down a road that curved amongst those hills, mountainous glades sweeping away from us like the pages of an open book, as we chased after brooks that split the land, just perchance to find their beginnings or their ends. After entering it, we wandered the town's seventeenth century castle grounds and gardens, along the way learning of its old Celtic legend about Finvola O'Cahan, the Gem of the Roe—the Roe being the winding river in which our heroine gets her title; the very same one we swam in without a stitch to cover us when we found it fleeting through the cornfields at the farther end of town at its exit, where it swelled most. We climbed Benbradagh Mountain, which crowns Dungiven like a headstone, scrambling through Jurrassic fields up towards the very righthand peak that equally matched the lefthand side so that the summits resembled the muscular breast of the great chiefs of the O'Cahan clan. It was there, up in the mountain, where at night we noticed that the streetlights mapped out the outline of an assault rifle from afar.' Lost in the fond memories of that summer, Frankie's arm moved behind Charlie's head and the hand at the end of it swept his fringe back and forth. 'We smoked stale cannabis, drank some bitter brandy, and slept beneath the stars on the slabs of the gravestones in the ruins of the Old Priory, an ancient stone monastery that sleeps the bones of the O'Cahan clan. There was a tomb in there that was locked behind a gate, a stone monument with a sleeping statue resting atop, from what I could see in the moonlight spearing through, and I wondered all night if that was where Finvola was at peace.'
'What was the story of the Gem of the Roe?' Charlie asked.
'A Scottish chief from the Island of Islay fell madly in love with the wild beauty.' Frankie lit another cigarette, eyes dead ahead. 'Dermot O'Cahan, the chieftain of the O'Cahans, agreed to their marriage on the conditions that his daughter's body be returned to the Roe Valley upon her death for burial. Some time later, Finvola's brothers heard a piercing wail on Benbradagh Mountain and recognised the call of their banshee, Grannie Roe O'Cahan, a female spirit that is usually seen as an omen of death and a messenger from the underworld, who only cried for the death of an O'Cahan. When they'd returned from the mountain, they discovered all at home alive and well. However, the banshee wailed and wailed and wailed on through the night from the forest high above, and they soon realised that it must be Finvola who had died. When her body was not returned, her brothers set sail for Islay and for Finvola. There, they found her husband broken with grief. He told them that he could not bring himself to part from Finvola's body and had buried her on the island, but that they may take her now that they had come. So, she was finally brought back to Dungiven and to her people, setting the banshee's cry at rest.'
'That sounds somewhat ... chilling. And you stayed there all night?'
Frankie nodded. 'In the morning, we followed a path through the trees and down a steep slope that dramatically fell away from the crumbling bawn, where we came across the remains of an old mill in disrepair. With out hearts piqued with curiosity, we rushed up the rusted steps of the mill to discover that it had been gutted, but the stone walls glittered with hundreds of names belonging to the townsfolk, graffitied in the prime of their youths with ink and paint that shone like multicoloured stars in the night sky. Ciarán and I felt compelled to add our own names to the walls as a testament to all those who'd came, done, gone, and went. A large square had been cut out of one side of the building. We sat down there and drank some more like two old fishermen, or two that had just finished their labours. With our feet dangling over the edge, we were serenaded by the songs of the countryside. We smoked cigarettes, sang some, and enlightened one another in what made our hearts so heavy sometimes until on came the dying sun.'
And did you kiss? Charlie wondered. Did you fall in love there? How could you not in such a place so rich and full with romance?
'I remember clearly, because it struck me as something I'll remember clearly many years from now, how Ciarán stood up to write in large, blocky black letters along the back wall: "THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING". Feeling as young and as wild and as free as the birds above—for a little while, at least—I understood then, and I understood the nation, and I understood what it means to be from Éire. It is a place of great beauty and great sadness, still mourning her wounds, quietly suffering the new and the old that were still healing to scar, but it was always so loudly merry. A place so pretty it pains the heart. Despite her torments, it was also a land where one could believe, just perhaps, that myth and folklore might still truly exist in secret to this day. For some of her people do believe—the Irish and Ireland, I mean—as their fairy bushes are considered sacred. One queer man saved a whitethorn tree from being demolished by submitting an injunction against those posing plans of a motorway through it in fear of the retribution from fairies if their homes were destroyed. Truth be told, Charlie, though I know my heart to be English red and my bones Italian brown, I always considered my blood to be Irish green from my grandmother's side—if Ireland would only accept me willingly, that is, the usurper's bastard that feels akin to her ethos. Mind you, I'd never dare say such a thing to Ciarán Quinn because he'd likely cut my bollocks off with a rusty nail. To that Hibernian patriot, you're from one country and one country only, through and through: the homeland where you were born, the place where you were raised, the lands where you were made.'
'So, that's how you spent your summer days? Though a grand adventure that does sound, undeniably and enviably so, I take it you weren't accosted by cruel kidnappers and savage mercenaries that you'd fended off rather admirably from your days of fencing like Eton would have me so heartily believe?' Charlie sighed wistfully, for although the circumstances of the tale differentiated extraordinarily compared to how Frankie had truly spent the season, it still sounded—despite being realistic—just as equally thrilling. 'Truth be told, I couldn't help but imagine you as the hero in those tales told back in that school, shield and sword in hand.'
'Oh, but you must know that I've played the villain several times over, too. Truth be told, Chance, how that fabled sword was wooden, how that mythical shield was glass, I'll tell you what very few others have ever known of my time before that summer.' Frankie looked onwards and upwards towards the roof, refraining from looking upon him as his fingers continued to gently scrape across the other boy's scalp. 'My soul had endured one very long winter season. Until my days with you became my only summer again. Come nightfall, I still go to sleep most nights with dreams of myself dancing, laughing, running away with you. You see, several years ago, I'd stumbled prematurely into an endless, spiralling world of adolescence and decadence before anyone else my age with some very close friends of mine, touring the streets in search of the one true thrill of it all—amidst our rebellions and revelry, of course. These people my heart adored so wholly were on a mad quest in search of themselves in their very first highs—for nothing feels as good as it, and that is why we always returned disappointed and spent, but hopeful that it'll be just as satisfying sometime soon. My, how sensational those three were—and are still, I'm sure—and how my love for them went beyond this plane. Like that sunset over Dungiven, they were completely unalike anything else in this world: volatile creatures with a sickness in their skulls. And they understood me to the very bones of me, able to see at times that I was like a demented elderly man with an old soul and childish whims and be fine with it—encourage it, actually. They never feared my mind. In fact, beyond my own problems, we shared a psychological condition that plagued us: of wishing to lose ourselves within that void of our own madness.'
'What problems?' he asked.
'To tell you the truth, Charlie, I'm mad. Absolutely mad sometimes.' He smiled assuringly. 'And to some degree, so were they. And that made me not feel so alone all the time. We called ourselves the Revellers. Like some sort of miscreant band of troublemakers and musicians, in which our screams and laughters were our only songs and our love our instruments. Boys and girls who lived momentarily behind the glow of amber cigarette light, who had an irrational fear of growing too old to die too young, who were charged with electrical lunacy over an overwhelming understanding that we'll never be fifteen-, sixteen-, or twenty-five years old again. Woeful of becoming older and terrified of being old, we fretted over one day being lost and forgotten amongst the withered dregs in a cold and dreary place, staring at the grey reflection of an unrecognisable, sagged, wrinkled face, chewed up and spat out by time and the world into one without colour. We bright young things, we feared departing the spotlight of the stage to join the extras and the audience in the shadows of the wings like all the decayed flowers after the collapse of the tulip mania. In hindsight, I think we'd quickly fathomed that one day all we will ever amount to is a name on a headstone, and we were determined not to do that without at least putting up a fight, with grit in our teeth and grazed skin on our bloody knuckles and knees. It loomed ahead of us like a dreaded omen due to come, and we ignored the moment approaching by becoming louder than the fate we must all one day eventually meet, whilst simultaneously daring it to take us—after all, it takes only a second to die, but it can take years to truly live. It was all that we ever wanted: to be told that we are so beautiful, that we are so young, that we're so powerful, so unstoppable, forever unforgettable. To tell the truth, it was a rocky road. Feeling our reckless days numbering, it was a restless life spent in feeling stuck searching for the precise word on the tips of our tongues, evasive evermore. I think now that I was just a very scared little boy, and for what purpose?'
'But you're a revelation, Frankie Carrozza,' Charlie whispered. 'A revolution, even. Look how you've liberated me now, and how you've done that to the masses. It wasn't all for nought.'
'I know you are, but what am I? Babe, believe me, it's all for you.' Carrozza smirked. 'Making these memories with you is the only thing that has truly sustained me from such an insatiable existence, and my only true happy times come around again like spring. However, don't misunderstand me: I confess, like any worthy addict, that there are nights when I miss such vivacious mania with all those—the toffs and the toughs—who also marvelled at the artistry of such confusion and chaos.'
Charlie inclined his head back to look up at him as he spoke. He didn't utter another word, but listened, captivated and captured, in the land of their bed. He had heard tell of the Revellers in Eton, a miscreant band of four elusive and exclusive members, but he believed it to be but a legend of the town.
'I had this dream, and bringing it into reality has since made me the ruler of this college kingdom I reign over now—mainly due to a series of unfortunate events.' Frankie sucked in deep on his cigarette and squinted thoughtfully, almost daringly. 'And so I await now, biding my time for the gallows, the noose, the executioner's block. Once there, I know I'll watch the ceremonious festivities of those dreams being dashed and divided into smithereens like a hundred-thousand stars up in the night sky that, in the last second, I'll wish upon over and over again for a brand new wish to rebirth from all those glittering and breaking and dying.' He stubbed the cigarette out and shrugged his shoulders defeatedly. 'After all, not many legendary kings lived unbloodied to an old age for a new one to arise. Truthfully, I don't think I mind its end very much: the removal of the crown, the unceremonious beheading of the beautiful hero—or the ugly villain, depending on your perspective. For I know now, after all this time, that it takes getting everything you once believed you ever wanted and losing it to know what true freedom looks like. I've been imprisoned inside my mind for so long, and delirium has been the king of this king.' When he lit another cigarette, he paused and scratched his brow nervously with the hand holding it. 'If my family ever truly found out exactly what I'd been doing, how I had been living my life, I'd imagine they'd ask me why. But there is no use trying to explain it to people who have a mind in peaceful harmony with their heart and soul. They have no idea what it's like to seek solace in the madness you've spent so long fighting, to see if it holds the rest you've systematically sought once unchained from it, and hoping for calmness to come wherever you lay your head that night—be it under a roof or the stars. To be home and feel sick to the heart and stomach with hiraeth. They think that we who live chaotically burn purposeless flames in our wake, laying an infernal waste to all in that path behind us—we, those of us with unsoundness of mind, who are absolutely consumed by looking for something to quench our thirst in a baptism of fire, of sorts. They have faith in us to shuffle off this mortal coil while we're young, new, silly, and fiery enough to blaze our own wicks out. We burn not just to keep warm and alive, but to keep away the shadows of the pitfall of mania just behind our feet.'
They slipped away from touching one another, lying side by side and facing the ceiling as the melancholic truth meandered outwards. Carrozza's delicate whisper was husky, somber, reluctant, and interrupted; his mind was unwilling to tell his story, but his heart and mouth betrayed it.
Surrendering, Frankie offered a gentle shrug. 'I was always an unusual boy. My mother once told me that I had an interchanging soul, a soul full of thousands, a chameleon spirit; that even since I was a child I could keep a secret with the best of them to a point, she confessed over a glass of wine, that my smile often told her that she would never truly know me; and that I was even better at hiding things—under loose floorboards, secret compartments in bookshelves, the hems of my jackets, gutted books, and the darkest corners of my mind. I was unshakable. A boy who stored no moral compass that pointed me due north. No true fixed personality that was visible to many, but a charm that morphed and adapted to suit what was needed from the desirous eye of all. I just had an inner indecisiveness that was as vast and as wavering as the emerald vales and as deep as the woodlands of the country.' He stopped to wipe a hand across his mouth and gather his thoughts, then shrugged his eyebrows as he crushed the cigarette out. 'If I said that I didn't plan for this to happen—to wear my crown and rule over the rest—then I'd be lying. You see, I was born to be a fairy tale—the achievable and unachievable crooked boy, impulsive, insatiable, mythical, and mystical, violent from a vandalized heart, and only just always almost out of reach. A boy who belonged to nobody, but was owned by everyone, who had demanded a claim to all, but had a right to none, with an insane reason for every experience of havoc pursued and a crazy obsession for freedom that utterly terrified me to the point that sometimes I can't even bear to talk about it. It hurled me out into a nomadic sense of hysteria, revelry, disorder, and an unspeakable oblivion that both dazzled and dizzied me with rapture and relief and ruin and rise again.' When he turned on his side to face him, Charlie rolled onto his, and the world slipped away, dissolving into nothingness. They were shipped along by a bed of shipwreck on an ocean of memories and troubles, floating to the stratosphere to soar through interstellar into the oblivion he just spoke of. Onwards towards their land, their world, their country that they kinged, as they mapped the ends of the white satin carriage with the edges of their bodies. 'Truth be told, Charlie Chance, I was in the wintry days of my life. And now, seasonally, I reckon that it is beginning to thaw.'
There was an inexplicable shift in the very air around them, a subdued version of that electrical moment they'd conjured just before they'd shared their first kiss. Quite unexpectedly, Charlie turned on his back. He couldn't explain it in words; it was as though his body was enchanted by some spell. He sat up and Frankie let him, as he himself fell back against the pillows and put his hands behind his head. Charlie got onto his knees and regarded him with a brand new expression: one of deep thought, with a hint of nervousness, a dash of desire, a sprinkle of sympathy, and the compulsion of certainty. He leaned down and softly pecked his lips with his own, and within those few precious milliseconds during that embrace, the decision was decided. Once he'd sat back again, Charlie's hands moved down to grab the hem of his blue jumper and tug it slowly over his head.
Frankie, with his innate expertise, immediately understood the gesture. He rose onto his elbows and looked to Charlie thoughtfully. Charlie stared back at him silently, his face and posture very serious—bar the sides of his hair that his jumper had thrown into a state of disarray. It was almost mechanical, almost magical, how his body seemed beyond his control. Like something baked in the oven, a timer pinged inside and the body knew it was ready. He almost felt locked inside a trance, his serene face unreadable as he approached the ritual.
Frankie hoisted himself up a little further until his face was level with Charlie's. His breath was warm against his cheeks and lips like sunlight when he whispered tenderly, 'Are you sure?'
Charlie nodded a fraction. His blue eyes swam with emotion when he nodded again, much more assuredly this time. He then reached out and took Frankie's jaws in his clammy palms and kissed him passionately like a promise. When Frankie sat up properly to rise to the occasion, Charlie allowed him to lead—for he knew that he knew how. Ever so softly, as though he was made of brittle glass, he kissed a path from Charlie's neck, caressing him with gentle electrical lightning bolts through each skin contact, and down his chest as he unbuttoned his shirt. His warm hands slipped underneath the divide slitting between and separated to delicately push the shirt from his shoulders and onto the floor. His tender touch, unshaken and absolutely certain, caused Charlie's body to tremble with anticipation when he felt Carrozza's hands fumble with the band of his pyjama trousers. Taking his time so as to savour it, Frankie slipped them down to his ankles before he returned to the waist for his yellow briefs, the other hand lovingly thumbing the skin over his hipbone and the white band of his underwear. Knocking together like flint, the spark their bodies sheltered together started to blaze.
'You're blushing.' Frankie laughed quietly, grazing his cheek against his mouth to tickle his brow with his curly hair. When Charlie touched his jaws, he added, 'Not up there.'
Charlie laughed into his mouth. When Frankie slowly laid him down on his back against the pillows and removed his own underwear, horrendous images from the pornographic material he and Iggy had once found inside a box of outdated, sodden, and dirty magazines stuffed into the ruins of a barn behind an abandoned shop filled his head. With perverse, teenage curiosity, they'd looked at the filthy pictures and seen naked bodies entangled and displaying the hairs of their sex between their thighs. But as Charlie's arms draped around the other boy's broad shoulders, as Frankie lifted his legs to hang them over his own warm thighs and tickle them with his fine hairs, as Carrozza buried his face into Charlie's neck, he understood this to be an act of affection rather than of lust. The top half of Frankie Carrozza's body—from his midriff—emerged from the white satin sheets of the bed to encompass him, an evangelical boy soaring over the heavenly clouds towards him like an angel. Once he'd positioned himself, he slowly pushed forward and the pain almost blinded Charlie. He gasped out in shock, and Carrozza asked his neck if he was okay. Rather than wait for a reply, he kissed him. He kissed him again, and the pain gradually subsided until it resembled something similar to pleasure that squeezed the small of his back and then spread to his shoulders when it unclenched. Chest to chest, their hearts thrummed a matching melody.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The thrust of the ocean, the lapping of the waves, the rhythm of the tide. Running his hands down his back, Charlie looked passed his shoulder towards his bottom, just about seeing the split between his buttocks as it repeatedly pumped the sheets up and down. When he dug his arms underneath Charlie and interlocked them, face buried in the pillow beside his head as he shimmied his hips faster, Charlie grabbed his face and kissed his mouth and cheeks. Reining himself in, the arms unlocked and pulled out from under him. Instead, he spread his fingers out on either side of Charlie's ribcage. Sweat dripped from his curls to slide down Charlie's collarbones. They stared into one another's eyes and hardly looked away for the duration of the act. The fire roared, blazing and bathing their bodies to illuminate them like splashes of amber liqueur, flickering and dancing their rising and falling shadows across the hearth and over the walls like rapid retellings of ascensions and declensions of empires galore. The fiery spirit burned to reflect its intense determination inside the pools of their irises. The dim tip of the sun, smouldering grey behind the clouds and trees, beckoned dawn out of the skies, a hush following that soothed the last winds of the storm. Panting now, Charlie rested his hands on Frankie's chest to steady himself, clinging on desperately to the edge of his own body that was now reshaping itself under new sensations that acted as the key to the lock of primal urges, feeling nubs poking at the centre of his palms, just as the other boy gripped his hips. The room sang with no groans of lust, no moans of pleasure, no hallelujahs from the choir—there was barely any sound at all; it was silent of everything but the heavy, harsh, and laboured breathing and the slow pattern of movement from the two boys. Their skin was damp and warmed by the fireplace, but the sheets and blanket were cool against their bared bodies. Although somewhat lost to sensual gratification blooming up his spine like a magical spell, Chance could tell that this was different from what Carrozza was used to: the style of the act was unfamiliar to him; his eyes were empty of that primitive look of lust and aggressive desire that they had been possessed with on that Halloween night in the forest. They were filled now with a quiet sort of passion, a resolution of committed concentration brimming in them that matched Charlie's. His tongue was clenched between his teeth at the corner of his mouth like a schoolboy working hard on a particularly difficult equation as his hips toiled, writhed, and bucked against the other boy. At the beginning of it all, he wore a look of surprise and puzzlement, his hands hesitant like a large giant inside a tiny house and fearing breakages, but that had been lost to him and replaced with certainty and perseverance as they carried on to share more than just the last syllable of their nicknames tonight—or, rather, today. His eyes remained locked on Charlie, who had his lips tightly closed as they wavered in their work together. Their fingers interlocked together against the pillow on either side of Charlie's head, his mouth parting open and trembling closed again, his eyes squinting and fluttering throughout. It would be a mistake to think him still wincing from pain, for he was surely not—an enjoyable tingling sensation of pleasure flushed up his back to fog his thoughts until they whispered faintly. Their lips were kissed fuller, the swollen mouths and cheeks coloured with a becoming red. Disengaging his hands from his, shoulders hunched, Charlie spread his fingers against Frankie's torso until they clasped the sides of his ribs to feel the grooves between the bone and muscle underneath his bronze skin.
This was not an act performed solely to seek ecstasy from, as it was in most situations, but something different entirely: if a curse dwelled in the boy, then enchantments existed, too, to break that hex. It was a charge suffused, not a mind-boggling electrical ignition veiling the room, a soft hum of energy resounding outwards like the secret whispers of the woods. A force was involved, an indescribable agent that possessed the wills of both boys with the same spirit that had a cause of its own for the great feat to be done—beyond other-worldly pulses, delirious sensations of the body, and archaic impulses, pleasure was the least of its concerns. It was a quiet sort of fervour, ascending bodily urges to inconceivable reasons higher than their young minds could yet comprehend—until consummated. It assumed the role of their master and they were slaves to it, with no other choice but to obey. Despite the undercurrent of overpowered lust, it was a ritual; a rite of passage; a ceremony to fill the cracks in their fragments with clarity; it was the sealing of a sacred vow; it was a sacrament of love; it was a testament to their youth. There was both a wise and callow purity in it, untainted by true adulthood and corruption, and an innocence derived from the lambs in spring. This, in its own particular, peculiar way, was what mostly gave them gratification and euphoria. Charlie felt gratitude for this: finding something special in it. He never wanted his first time with a faithful companion to be sordid and degrading like some desperate act in a cheap motel room that stunk of gin, smoke, sour sheets, and debauchery, such thoughts causing him to imagine all sorts of unsavoury situations that he was quick to forget by focusing on other sensations—the tug of their lips and movement of their tongues during the squirm and thrust, the warm wetness in their mouths, the sweet-scented sweat dangling from their lashes and hair, the constricting muscle near his collarbones as the bodies rolled, wavelike.
Their eyes glistened glasslike—both very faraway, but drifting towards the same place together as they remained focused on the other in silence. No need to speak, they continued in cooperation until their toil and moil produced a rhythmic harmony. Their raspy breaths filled the room as Frankie's face filled his eyes.
I know not a thing of poetry, other than to say that you are a sonnet embodied, Charlie thought as he stared back at the boy, wistful and elsewhere as his hands searched for his. However, I do know music and books. And I know that this is our song and story, and I know that not all the audience will appreciate the tune or tale if they were to ever hear it sung or said aloud. But I will sing and say you forever, regardless.
Quite suddenly, so unexpectedly that it would've taken Charlie by surprise had he not been concentrating so diligently, Frankie took him into his mouth down bellow and then replaced his lips with a hand. He rose up, sliding the other hand around the small of his back, and kissed him on the lips firmly enough to hurt them against his teeth and nearly hard enough to draw blood. When Frankie buried his face into the crook under his chin again, the pace quickened vigorously. Charlie pressed his mouth to his shimmering shoulders and curls, the salty taste of skin slick with perspiration on his lips, smooth skin with a fuzz of fine hair against his teeth like he was biting into a ripe peach. His mouth returned to his and their eyes squeezed shut when both bodies began to shudder and shake like an earthquake. When they exploded like two geysers, not a sound was able to escape his lips; the silence passed onto Frankie's tongue once the act reached completion. As the bodies jerked and twitched together, like souls leaving the dying spasms to the dead soldiers in the trenches, their senses were obliterated, taking them briefly up through interstellar and into a cosmos full of intergalactic fireworks. They were a world away.
    Once he fell all the way back to earth again, Charlie felt exalted. His trembling limbs felt taller than his form, stretching farther than the world could dare hold, until they were like two giants roaming their own pastures together in this snuggery. With his fingers digging into Frankie's skin and his chin resting on his shoulder, Charlie breathed in his intoxicating, savoury, and musky scent as the world slipped away from them and they burned like two bodies sculpted together, having achieved a conclusion.
Once thoroughly regressed, they both remained in silence for some time afterwards. Charlie rested his head on Frankie's stomach and listened to the jubilant ticking of his heartbeat, thumping against his ear like a pulsating star, as his head rose and fell with each ebb and flow of the breaths sucking in the smoke of another cigarette. All of a sudden, as soon as the act had ended, he was left struggling with his Christian beliefs as he lay in bed with another boy.
'You're so quiet,' Frankie whispered nervously.
Charlie closed his eyes tight, his heart plagued with all too familiar emotions that he'd felt after the first few times he'd touched himself as an emerging young boy. The bedsheets were tangled between his legs, and Carrozza's body was held close to him, half of it under him—still, by his side, nonetheless. Although reluctant to answer, he murmured, 'I wondered if I might feel somewhat different, but I didn't imagine I'd feel like this. I feel—'
'—guilty? Regretful? Repulsed? Disgusted? Ashamed?'
'A little.' Charlie winced. 'Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed it happened, too, and I did enjoy every—'
'It's okay, really. Almost everyone feels like that for a little while after their first and second and third time or so.' Frankie reached down to muss the back of his head. 'It's because we go to sermons every Sunday where they tell us that it's wrong, that we'll go to Hell for it, that we're a disgrace. But did it feel sinful in the moment?'
'No, not at all. It felt—' he paused. Heavenly, he thought.
'Then there you have it: your answer.' Frankie sat up somewhat on the bed, his shoulders resting against the headboard as he smoked the cigarette. A puff of blue smoke coiled around his mouth. He inhaled and, with a jerk of his jaw, a hoop hurled out like a halo floating across the snowy hills of the white sheets towards the blazing fireplace before it dispersed. 'If you wait until it feels right, you'll be waiting your whole life. Don't let pastors, preachers, and priests spoil a beautiful, natural moment between two people. And don't feel so rotten and wretched with misery over it for too long, won't you?'
'Do you feel like that right now, too?'
'No, it goes away after some practice.'
'What do you feel afterwards with the people you ... that you—'
'—have sex with? I told you, it goes away after the first few times. Despite feeling a bit icky and weirdly wanting to repent right now, that'll fade and you'll be possessed with the same carnal desire to do it all again at some stage because it's just naturally in your disposition—and you'll do it and do it until it never comes back, even despite wishes of never wanting to again in fear of such feelings returning. That shame and sinfulness is man-made, not God-made, I assure you. I'm sorry if you thought love-making would instantly free us of these damned earthly chains, but I suppose it eventually does in a way. There are over 45,978,080 people in England right now who've endured these simultaneous joys and woes because of religious blasphemies, each one of them neither enlightened or dimmed, lost or found, but simply humans catering to natural urges. Do you think the lion cares what a God or man might think if it buggers another? So, why ought we because we have consciousness and clothes?' Frankie took another drag and mused for a moment. 'Now, afterwards, I wonder how I'll remember people years from now, instead. And that isn't to mean that that means I think they'll go, but I just wonder what nostalgic feeling I'll store of them in my memories from the yesteryears even if they don't. For you, for instance, despite lying in this bed with you now, despite maybe lying with you in one many years from now, I think I'll feel and think of old afternoon sunshine in the trees, the brisk tail end of the summer season glowing on the grey cobbles of Eton, laughter in an autumn-rusted field, and that very large and strange tree we found. What's warm?' he enquired. When a bewildered Charlie raised his head to ask him what he meant by such a bizarre question—for surely it was the fireplace—Frankie tilted his head and blinked at him curiously like a concerned and wondrous owl. 'Why are you crying?'
'What?' Charlie put fingers to his cheek to discover that it was wet from tears that he hadn't felt fall from his face onto Carrozza's navel. 'Good Lord!'
'Are they tears over virginal loss?' The joke died with his smile as Frankie reached down and wiped one away from under his eye with a thumb. 'Are they tears of ... of grief? I promise you, Charlie, these feelings won't last—'
'No.' Charlie smiled and shook his head as he wiped the other cheek with the back of his hand, quickly disregarding his need to apologise. He no longer felt such Christian jeremiads in his heart after a few kind and sensible words from Carrozza. He took Frankie's hand in his and raised it to his cheek, then pressed his lips to the heel of it. He shook his head again and leaned down to press a kiss to Frankie's chest so that his hair bunched against his skin. England and Christianity and God were a world away. Resting his head against him again to look to the daybreak, he confessed, 'They're happy tears.' Come what may, we'll remember this night for the rest of our lives. Whatever will be, will be.
Outside, he thought he saw snow begin to fall.