Just like yesterday, and the day before that, Charlie slept the light away. When he woke, he was unsurprised to see that it was almost night. Over the last few days, his bedroom seemed trapped in a perpetual state of lilac to him, the colour of Parma Violets, never to see daylight grace it again. The only other shades to find him hiding there were the blues, greens, and reds of Christmas decorations glowing beyond the curtains, but they were as festive as traffic lights and police sirens. He didn't move from the bed for the longest time, lying there feeling as though all the sunshine had been sucked out of the world. Winter was beautiful, but he failed to fathom its naked beauty. Some nights, he'd wake to watch a dark golden sunset retreat across the snowy fields far away, yet it didn't think it so sublime, even though he knew he ought to. His body had felt the burden of his blues upon waking long before his mind remembered the reason for his grieving. When it did, both mind and body begged for sleep, but he ignored them; he'd slept away the days purposely to get to this one: it was time to go.
He kept the lights off when he crawled to the bottom of the bed and opened the window to let out the stale smell of cigarettes—along with the fresh smoke of the cigarette that he'd snatched from his bedside dresser. An old cup of tea sat beside it on the desk, a thin layer of scum along the top, untouched and still and cold in winter—just like him, just like Frankie. Charlie tugged at his navy jumper and black jogging bottoms to get the dishevelment out of them that sleep had caused, both colours of the material blending in with the bland shades of the shadows in the room. He looked to his white socks with their dirty soles in the amber light of the lamp posts, poking up from the gutters of Eton outside the window like giant cigarettes, a hazy head of winter-white puff smoking around the tops.
Several fists hammered on the door, causing his heart to leap jaggedly before it slumped like a drunk.
'Charlie, are you in there?' Iggy called. 'Are you home yet?'
Somewhat relieved, he closed his eyelids and felt their heaviness.
A foot kicked the door. 'I know you're in there, Chance,' he heard Seraphina yell. After another hard kick to the bottom of the wood, she hissed, 'I can smell the cigarette smoke! Open this door right now, or I'll bring it in around you!'
A few minutes later, he crossed to the door and opened it to stop them from drawing attention. The door wasn't opened a crack before Seraphina Rose barged her way inside and marched into the middle of the room, scoping the place as if she was looking for someone else.
'My goodness, Charlie! We thought you'd been murdered, or that someone kidnapped you, or that you got expelled!' Iggy yelped, as Charlie returned to smoking his cigarette by the window. 'Just where have you been?'
'Nowhere,' he mumbled truthfully.
'Well, you certainly haven't been going to class, I can tell you that much. Nobody has seen you around Eton or Windsor for ages! Nor have you been with Frankie Carrozza. According to Serphina, he swears he's been trying to reach you for days!' Iggy continued relentlessly. It was true that Carrozza had been trying to ring him at Baldwin's Bec, but Charlie never answered any of his phone calls. 'Why haven't you been with Frankie—' Iggy was interrupted by Seraphina swiftly elbowing him in the stomach. 'Where—Where h-have you been?' he coughed and spluttered.
'I told you.' Charlie dug his fingers into his dark hair to drag it from his darkened eyes and caught his reflection in the windowpane, much paler than usual. 'I've been nowhere.'
They didn't say anything, and Charlie ignored them. However, Seraphina stood fretting with her arms folded in the centre of the room, a tooth nibbling on a lip, unable to look away from him like an opened wound that was both fascinating and disgusting. He slowly took his mouth away from the butt of the cigarette, his sleep-bruised eyes moving away from overlooking Eton to stare back at her. His fingernail scratched his bottom lip as he contemplated her and her tight-jawed, fearful gaze.
'You knew, didn't you?' he asked her. 'Of course you knew.'
'Knew what?' she blurted. But she was too loud, too abrupt, too wide-eyed, giving the game away.
'He ... he's insane,' he whispered.
His reply broke the girl's cool demeanour. Her eyes filled with distress as she rushed forward, dropping to her knees by the bed. 'Oh, Charlie!' she sighed, looking somewhat guilty for not being able to forewarn him, it seemed. 'My darling Charlie. He's not, he's not! He's just—he's just ... he's just not like you or I. His mind isn't wired wrong, it just operates differently—'
Iggy looked between them both suspiciously and wagged a finger. 'What are you two talking about?'
'Have you slept ... at all? I mean, have you slept properly?' She glanced around the jumbled mess of his room, and then looked to Charlie's dark and weary and deadpan stare with concern in her own eyes. She frowned thoughtfully as she smoothened his bedsheets—where he had spent the last three days hibernating brokenly away from the world under the covers like a child hiding from the monsters, unwilling to stir. He knew how it looked: that he'd spent the last few days living like Frankie Carrozza, as if his disease had somehow transferred onto him, too. 'You look so miserable,' she whispered.
'Wretched and pathetic, you mean.' He shrugged his eyebrows, and thought, I am miserable.
'Never—'
'Please, will someone tell me what the hell is going on?' Iggy demanded.
Charlie dithered over whether to tell him or not. If he didn't, then it wouldn't become real to him. But if he did, perhaps they could tell him that it didn't happen, that it was impossible, that it was all a bad dream, that Trevor Hamilton didn't exist, and that he and Frankie didn't for that matter, either. He was reluctant to do so as it meant returning to that godforsaken night, in which the briefest reflection brought on a subdued sense of horror and dread. It stung to remember how the fear warmed his belly and hurried his breathing as he spied on them that evening, feeling his heart rot like the flesh of a peach until it was as hard as the bitter stone inside. It was just like how he had felt when he woke up in the middle of the night after a terrifying dream as a child, hiding under the covers of his bed, alone and lost in the dark. But that was long ago, and this was now. Those had been nightmares, and this had been a real place—that dark, dark loft, where his chest had been slashed, dashed, and splashed over the walls to leave behind the gore of his heart.
And just like those nightmares, maybe this one will leave me, too, one day, Charlie hoped as he glanced out the window again—beyond Eton, beyond Windsor, into the faraway. Good God, but the pain. His heart hurt like the dickens. Just like the universe, there were no walls to it, there was no end, and he did not understand. Right now, all Charlie desperately wanted was to just go home.
'Oh, Charlie!' Seraphina whispered sympathetically as she moved closer to put her hand on his knee. 'This wasn't meant to happen. This wasn't supposed to turn out this way.'
'What are you talking about?' he asked, jerking away from her touch.
'It ... it was just supposed to be a harmless summer fling in the months of autumn.' She took a deep breath in and her chest swelled and fell with the weight of her guilt. 'Frankie was leaving at the end of the year, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity. And if not then, then most of him would go away come winter anyway, and this would've probably faded with him—naturally, that is. You were to be his saving grace, a sense of innocence returned to him. And you, you were to learn from it and let it liberate you. Happiness ... true happiness .... was never intended to be part of it. You weren't supposed to fall in love with him.' She leaned back on her heels and scooped some of his hair out of his eyes. 'I let you dip your feet into him like a shallow creek, unawares that you'd fallen into him like an ocean and drowned, and I was too late to save you from him. I underestimated you and him and everything! He ... he was leaving. He's leaving. There was to be lust, but never love. Frankie Carrozza has always been too much for anyone. You ... you weren't supposed to fall in love with him.'
'How was I to know?' Charlie demanded. When the pity in her eyes became too much, he looked into the faraway again, a grey horizon full of oncoming storms. 'Nobody told me how it's supposed to be. Nobody said what it's like for people like me. Girls can go to libraries and read thousands upon thousands of books about men and women falling in love with each other in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places, but I didn't know because no one has ever prepared me for it. Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet might have a fair idea on what to do, but not I. No, not Charlie Chance. What do we get? We get a hidden history, we get Oscar Wilde whispering about it, puzzling poems that are too confusing to interpret, and cryptic metaphors that we've to read into much too deeply. We get villains in old films, comedic reliefs that are mocked, tragic characters that die too soon, and ones that we've to base her hope on being portrayed a certain way without being too sure. We get morsels and crumbs! Other boys and girls are taught about it, but I didn't know. I wasn't warned ...'
'I'm sorry, Charlie,' she whispered, as if she was at fault. 'I'm so sorry.'
'It's in your blood to defend him to the bitter end, till your very last breath, and I admire that so. I won't ask or force you to speak badly of him. But it's so strange,' he said to nobody in particular, 'how you can wake one day and find the whole world so colourless and bland and bleak. Is this how it feels?' he wondered. 'Is this what it feels like when dreams die?'
After a long period of silence from him, she asked worriedly, 'What are you thinking on?'
'You sound just like him.' Charlie's eyes bore into the hillsides. 'I forget sometimes that you're a part of him. It must be something in the Rose family: the need for you to know the unsaid.'
'True,' she carefully said. 'We're extremely curious creatures. We desperately need to figure absolutely everything out.'
'Would he ever have loved me, Seraphina?' He looked to her mournfully. 'I thought that I was good enough. I was even starting to believe that I was worthy of it. But if this is love, I do not want it. I thought that I could wake him from his deep sleep like some prince in a fairy tale. And if I couldn't, then I'd have stayed with him and waited until he came back to me. I just feel so sad,' he said wistfully. But in truth, he felt nothing. He felt grey inside. He felt like an old, dank, and dark house in decay, waiting for a spark of life and light to come back on inside, for dawn to pave the floorboards again. 'What a sad notion it is that we'll never laugh in the sunshine together again.'
'My darling, love is so very complicated—'
'Spare me.' He stared out the window again towards the opaque grey, ever so slightly bloodied with a subdued dusk. The cigarette in his hand had burnt all the way down to the end without ever touching his lips. He flicked the long head of ash over the sill. 'Honestly, I feel so dull and so hollow, as though all my insides have been scooped out. Truth is, I never knew how big I was until I was made to feel so terribly small.'
As soon as he'd grasped the situation, Iggy stuttered his excuses and left the room. The sight of a bleeding, broken heart made him too uncomfortable, as if the black drabs of grief pouring from it might stain all of his sunshine and glitter. Charlie didn't notice that he'd went, and nor did he care that he did.
'You will feel terrible. You will feel wretched. You will feel miserable for I can't say how long; perhaps the timing is based on the measure of the love you feel,' Seraphina said as she lay down beside him. 'You will feel so very insignificant in this world, like a fly in a large country house, because this is the worst of it right now.' She watched him curl into himself like a creature stung by a scorpion, then quietly added, 'But some tomorrow soon, you will be you again. You will be better. You might even be a better version of you. You will persevere through all this pain, because you're human, and humans adapt remarkably well to such a loss—almost always sometimes. With time, all of the sorest things shrink to become a dull ache. So, I'm going to let you cry about it if you must. I'm going to let you go home to wallow and mope for a little while, and then I want you to come back with all of yourself back in your eyes and your head held higher than before. Feel it, feel all of it, and then feel free of it.'
'I can't see how that could be so.' He looked down towards her at the end of the bed from where he lay at the top on his side. 'I want it to be so, really.' Wincing and wearily, he said, 'Oh, Seraphina, but the pain!'
'I know, Charlie. I know.'
'I feel like an old autumn tree—here, yet dying.' He turned on his back and stared at the ceiling. 'As my heart induratizes, inspissating in the very air around me to gloom the room, I feel it wilt coldly inside me as though my heart is dying. The weeds choke me of my words in my throat, the sap of it sours my blood, and thorns prickle my skin until it pinches. And like the ancient trees, I just want to sleep for a thousand years, hidden deep in a forest to call my own. Yet, I know I will go on existing regardless, having to live with my eyes open and walk with my heart feeling, fearing the day and ruing tomorrow. I am an old autumn tree, and winter has come for me.'
'Wouldn't that be a dream?' she whispered. 'If people could just go off into the woods and live as a tree for a while, turning our hearts to bark before they can break.'
'I dreamt that he loved me long ago,' Charlie whispered. 'I dreamed that he was a spy in the sixties, and we were both in hiding in Europe—somewhere in Amsterdam, I think. I'd met him by the canals, and he was just back from doing business in either Borneo or India that would keep us from being discovered. I could still smell the spices on his clothes. We were so happy, reunited on that bridge after so long apart, and had purchased tickets to return to Malta for good. But there was a noise, and then there was blood on his shirt. He'd been assassinated in my arms, but he'd said it had been me who was shot. I'd looked down to see a bleeding hole in my navel. Trevor Hamilton stood behind him, holding the smoking gun that shot me through Frankie.'
'What do you think it means?' she joked.
'Maybe it's not a metaphor meant to be interpreted,' he responded. 'Maybe it's literal and prophetic.'
'If so, then promise me you'll never go to Amsterdam, my darling. I couldn't bear to lose you to Trevor Hamilton.'
They laid there like that for some time, like two silent attendees at a funeral, both far from oblivious to one another's sorrows and scars.
'Perhaps it's the us of us that is dying. Not him, not me ... but the us of us, the we of it all,' Charlie whispered to the dark, poisoned with melancholy and premature nostalgia. 'Seraphina, I'm lost,' he said, though he knew she was sleeping. 'I'm empty and aching in agony, and I don't know why.'
When the clock struck six, Charlie left her in his bed. He went into the bathroom and washed off the last few days, allowing the dregs of his sadness to clog together between his toes before they were swallowed up by the plughole. He stood underneath the water long enough until he looked a little more presentable to the outside world. After a swift kiss to Seraphina's pearly cheek, he quickly shoved a few things together into a bag before he left the room. Baldwin's Bec was empty of students; most of them had already left to go home. Charlie himself would be gone by true nightfall. Purpose carried his ghost, wavering him through the halls to haunt it with business unfinished. His limbs felt tired and heavy, but he continued on in his pilgrimage, stepping out into a dull, murky, and grey evening sky that made his eyes ache. The thick clouds were shattered with cracks of imprisoned sunset, smouldering dark gold and swelling from within the reddish pall that hung over the rooftops. The snow had melted into slush as he trekked through Eton, holding tight to his bag and wearing the cold. Although not a single townie glanced in his direction as he fleeted through the night, he still pulled his cap down over his eyes to hide them, fearful of what he'd see reflected in their own and in their faces—this cold and lifeless thing that he'd become, perhaps, all soulless and undead. He felt ever so ghostly as he wandered through this purgatory, discombobulated by lack of sleep so that everything seemed surreal.
Charlie reached the station in the nick of time: his seven o'clock train home was waiting at the tracks. He took his seat in an empty carriage and set his bag on his lap for warmth, looking outside and waiting for the darkness to start to shuffle passed. Out on the platform, a dark figure darted and leapt like a shadow aboard the train just before the doors closed, hands stuffed deep into their pockets. As Windsor slipped away, he wondered if that other version of himself was still buried somewhere out there in the snow. It was leaving quickly now, so it wouldn't be long before they found his swollen body left forgotten on the banks, his clothes sodden, heavy, and drenched with the last of the sleet melting on his back, the fine material smeared with wet soil and grass stains, and his skin as pale-blue as moonlight.
The carriage door opened and someone stepped inside, sure to shut it tight behind them. Charlie needn't bother to look up: he'd know those footfalls in sand, in grass, in water, and even in death; he would recognise the scent, the touch, the movements of him even if he was blind.
He looked up anyway and set reluctant eyes upon Frankie Carrozza as he took the seat opposite. The train was chugging earnestly now, plunging out into the black countryside. Frankie's face was somewhat anxious as he folded his arms inside his navy peacoat and cupped his hands against the sides of his ribcage until his body stooped forward, bent over slightly like a crooked steeple. He was shivering, looking like an addict after their next fix. What a fallen angel he seemed, and Charlie despised himself for thinking it, though his white feathers were crumbling apart to reveal monstrous black leathery wings underneath. Rather than speak immediately, Charlie just stared at him with reproachful eyes. Although he did not understand Frankie's ailment, he acknowledged that it must have taken remarkable strength to pry himself from his haven to come here, and every strenuous second of his being here put a great difficulty upon him. He felt overcome with an overwhelming array of emotions at the sight of the brooding face of his darkest omen. He wanted to reach out and touch him, trace his fingers along the peachy fuzz of his cheeks. He wanted to feel the warmth of his arms in his as the muscles contracted to hold one another tight against the death that'll part them. He wanted to go back to that night in Malta, where they never should have left, and stay there with him to make a little pocket out of forever. But he also wanted to cause as much pain to him as he had inflicted in turn. He wanted to make him suffer, to wield vicious words like spears hurled from Troy and plunge them into his impenetrable chest, right through to his invincible heart so that he could see it flow, so that he could see it vulnerable, so that he could see him despair, too. What a contradiction: to want to be closer to him, and to want to be as far from him as possible.
'How'd you know?' Charlie asked him. 'How'd you know that I was there?'
'I found this. You ... you left it behind.' Frankie reached inside his coat, withdrew the crumpled playbill, and handed it to him. 'I'm sorry,' he croaked. 'I'm so, so sorry, Charlie. At least let me try to explain—'
'Don't bother,' he replied coldly. 'There is no word for what we were—a somewhat romantic friendship, maybe? Or beneficial mates, perhaps? But mainly we were just something unconventional. A term doesn't exist for us. It's alright, really. We had nothing that bound us together—'
'No, it isn't,' Frankie replied hoarsely. 'You can't even look at me. It isn't alright. You're clearly devastated.'
'Don't flatter yourself!' Charlie scoffed. 'Mind you, you don't look so great yourself.' It was a lie, of course. Even his tragedy was beautiful. Despite everything, Charlie still wanted to comfort the incubus because he looked ever so tired, weakened significantly by the toll of tearing himself away from the comfort and safety of his bed. The sleepless bruises underneath his eyes, the thinning of his sallow face, the dishevelment of his limp curls, even the hole in his sock was heartbreaking. They were sitting close together, yet such a great distance was placed between that had no physical form, making him feel so far away. 'Why'd you come after me?'
'You're upset,' he said.
'Mightily educated of you to realise,' he replied, somewhat bitterly.
'It didn't mean anything,' said Frankie.
Charlie frowned, acting oblivious. 'What didn't?'
'What I ... what I did.'
'Say it.' The rise of his fury flickered in his lungs and in the ruins of his heart, creating a fire in his throat like the smoky snort of a dragon's nostrils. 'If you're going to mention it, at least have the balls to confess it, Frankie.'
'What you saw between me and Trevor Hamilton.' He looked at him exhaustedly. 'It was a moment of weakness—of misjudgement, even. I wasn't in my right mind. I wasn't myself. I ... I—I'm not myself.' He rubbed his forehead and sighed out his frustration. 'I'm trying to explain it, trying to give an idea of me and Trevor's sick and twisted relationship, but it's so difficult to put into words. It's so hard for someone else to understand. This might sound like utter bollocks to you, but I swear that I did it to save you. I did it to keep him away from you.'
'"Relationship"?' Charlie questioned.
'Friendship,' Frankie corrected, 'for the lack of a better term. It wasn't something I wanted to do. Honestly, all I want to do now is go back to that little kingdom that we'd made out of my room, where all else beyond it seemed to no longer exist.'
'We can't go back,' Charlie admitted. When his eyes grew misty, he looked out the window again to hide them. 'Don't you see? We can't ever go back there.'
'Why not?' Frankie demanded through clenched teeth. 'I'll be better soon, I promise. When the spring comes back around, I'll be me again. You just have to wait it out. I'll be the me you fell for. I'll be better, I'll do better—'
'Even if we could, Frankie, why would I want to now?' Charlie looked at him and shook his head sadly. 'Carrozza, what have you done? Why did you do it?' He rested his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands. 'I feared you were capable of it, but I never thought you'd do it to me ...'
'But can't you see?' Frankie demanded angrily, pointing through the glass in the door as if Trevor Hamilton blurred across it. 'It wasn't me!'
'What?' Charlie glanced up at him. 'Of course it was.'
'It was the low me, yes—the one in his deep, dark days—but it was Trevor who orchestrated it all.' He pointed at the playbill that had fallen to the floor. 'He set it all up: he bided his time until I was at my weakest, sent you that invite, and then came over to wreck everything! This is what he wanted! This is what he does! We can't give in to him—'
Charlie recoiled from the madness in his eyes. 'But ... I saw. Hamilton didn't force you to do anything. Not really. Blaming everything on getting caught is no excuse. You've ruined it. You put that kingdom on fire in an instant—in that instant.' He looked to his folded arms and blinked slowly. 'All I wanted was ... to mean something to you.'
'You do mean something to me, and you know that!'
'Do I? You've a funny way of showing it.'
'Don't worry, I'm paying my dues now, too.' Frankie sighed. 'This darkness in me, when it spreads in winter, it swallows whole everything good in my life. But perhaps I deserve it. Maybe this is me getting my just desserts: to cherish something golden, and then watch it blacken.'
'Honestly, do you ever listen to yourself?' Charlie asked. 'Or do you just talk and talk and talk in hope to God that at least some of what you say is either pretty or useful? Then again, what's your worth as a truth merchant?' Charlie shrugged and lit a cigarette. 'Tell me the truth. I only ever knew what you wanted me to see, didn't I? I think I just met the parts of you that made me susceptible. Because that's what you do, isn't it? You're like some sort of ... chameleon. You whore parts of yourself out to others, depending on what it is they need of you. But there is so much more going on undersurface, isn't that so? You're cracked. Unhinged, even.'
Frankie stared at him sternly, then slowly dropped his eyes to look at their feet. 'You think of me as a whore, do you?'
'You're definitely some sort of hustler. You undress for someone to take their pieces of you like a rental just because you want to transition from average to excellence overnight through the misguided intentions of bettering yourself.' Charlie stared him down. 'No, I don't think of you as a whore. At least whores make a wage.' He licked his bottom lip and looked away again. 'I don't mean that you just do it with your sexuality. You sell parts of yourself other than just your sex for your reign. The wears and tears that must do to the soul—if that hasn't been sold already, too. It would make a lowlife of others, the things you've done to become the boy who roars louder than the others, but not you, somehow. No, of course, the glorious and marvellous and interchangeable Frankie Carrozza remains undefiled. If everyone could see you now, if they could feast their eyes upon the legend whose myth is told along the walls of Eton, upon the mouths of its pupils, and in the beds of those you've conquered. How is it possible that you get away with absolutely everything? How are you so bloody untouchable? You're the very thing you hate: entitled. See, I don't think you pay your dues: I think another makes that sacrifice. Is this what becomes of them after a chance encounter with you?' Charlie let his hands drop onto his thigh. 'Is this what we're turned into? Lackeys. If so, I dunno if you're worth that terrible price.' Again, he was drawn to the black outside his window. 'Frankie, I feel like you've reached in and turned the light switch off, and I'm scrambling through the dark trying to find it again. To give so much joy, and then to just kill it like that. It makes someone unwhole. You and Trevor deserve each other, if that's the case. You two truly aren't all that different: a vampire's crusade to form a legion out of the damned.'
'Charlie, let me explain. Allow me that. We—'
'You got what you wanted out of me, is that it?' he asked, mostly out of spite—out of an anger that was unjust, perhaps, considering the state that the other boy was currently in. So, he swallowed his fire-hot fury and stared at him sincerely, a soft shrug of defeat in his shoulders as his disgust recoiled. 'Back in Malta, I mean.'
'Christ, no!' Frankie glared at him, a shimmer of his old self in the anger in his eyes again. 'Do you think that? Do you think that low of me? Do you really think that I'd think like that? If you believe nothing else I say tonight, at least believe that it was real.'
'Then why wasn't I enough?' Charlie murmured.
'That was never a question.' Frankie rubbed his eyes out of exasperation. 'That wasn't what this was about.' He raised both of his hands out as though to cautiously gesture peace, shaking his head regretfully, and Charlie could see—with a slight shiver of marvel, with the smallest ounce of relief, with a shard of cruel enjoyment—that there was earnest pain in Frankie's expression now, too. 'You were never just a body to me, Chance. Believe me, you were never just that. I could never ...'
'I wish I'd never met you.' Charlie looked away from him, wiping a loosened tear on the cuff of his sleeve. The boy opposite him had given him precious memories worth his weight in gold, but there existed now only a cavernous hole that caused ache where they had once belonged before they were stolen away from him, never to return. The golden light glowing around those moments had died away to black. 'I feel like I barely know you,' he confessed, cursing the quiver in his voice. 'You're a stranger to me now, yet no one has ever hurt me like you have.' This is a rendition of my own little Greek tragedy, Charlie mused in grief. We two are the entire population of our own Pompeii. We are the reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclus, yet doomed still. I am Icarus, and I know now that I have flown much too close to the Sun, though I thought I knew how to fly. As melted wax thickens my fists, I find that I am falling.
Rather unexpectedly, it quickly dawned upon Charlie that all those sweet memories in the summery haze with Carrozza—their shared detention, their shared kiss, their shared adventures, the first time that he had told him that he loved him, and the first time that he had taken that love to bed—had been poisoned, eclipsed with a nightly shade. They were old photographs put to the flames to curl up, scorched and shrivelled like tortured beasts. He was plagued with a deep sensation of nostalgia once he understood that the boy he was in those moments had perished. Even if he was to forgive Frankie, his innocence would never return. The ashes of the pictures have shot up from the flames and into the aether, never to return and always out of reach. It made him feel sick to the stomach now as he tried to accept the monstrous transition of change that had come upon him from out of the scraggy shadows. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that he'd eventually wake up from this nightmare, but the hope held in that notion had ended with the merciless severance of the bond between them once he had accepted his own partial death. The epiphany had startled Charlie so much that tears sprung to his eyes. Frankie's mouth parted into a wounded wince as he, too, accepted in Charlie's expression the end of what once was.
'I felt him die in me: the boy that I once was; the boy who loved you,' he murmured morosely, until his eyes livened with his wrath. 'And you, you have made relics of us. You're ... hollow, Frankie. I once thought of you as a sensational and insatiable fire, an inferno living in your breast, a glass of champagne risen to toast the fireworks, but you're empty inside. And you've filled that vacancy with all of this worldly and other-worldly knowledge and experiences. You're a bookcase stacked with books, all the pages cut from the same forest, but you're no longer part of the woods surrounding that makes the shelves. But bearing your winter curse in mind, maybe that isn't your fault.' As he scrutinised him, Charlie squinted an eye as if to see if a fissure had been cracked open in him, one full of winter darkness and snowfall, to see if he could see what Hells and Heavens might bleed from the heart that contained them both. 'You, who made me feel truly alive—no, not just alive, but living beyond existing! But something fiery that we made together has choked and died in the season, in the night, here tonight, in these moments, left to drown in the slushy remains of the snow. I wonder, if I could, would I go back to those days that were so heavy with sunshine, and would I do it all differently? I don't know the answer to that. All I know is that you think you'll be fully revived when the spring returns again, but all the sun in the world couldn't melt the shard of ice in your heart. I wish I understood you. I thought I did.'
'If we can't go back, why not go forward? Let's leave this shitty place, Charlie. Let's just leave this all behind. We'll stay on this train until the end of the line, then we'll just get up and go. We'll explore the world together, just like how we planned—just you and me,' he whispered in anguish, but pride kept back his tears. Even if he was to accept this proposal, Charlie doubted that the boy had the energy for it. Frankie's world was burning to ashen ruins around him, and Chance could do naught but sit and watch mercilessly as the flames rose. 'Come with me. Let's take a car and run tonight.'
'It's too late,' Charlie whispered, as the beautiful dream blazed briefly through the night sky like a shooting star before it broke into a million pieces to die like comets too hot, scattering over the stratosphere to vanish across the world without them. A tear moistened Charlie's reddened lips at the thought of saying goodbye to it now. 'It's much too late, Frankie. Besides, you don't look like you'd make it as far as London, and I've no desire to do anything other than go home. I am but your creature now.'
Those last words injured Carrozza like lesions made with a whip; Charlie could see it in how the boy flinched, how he placed a hand on his hip and the other over his eyes as he bent his head back—but he didn't dare care. It was the truth. He felt vile, grotesque, and unrecognisable, so much so that even his own reflection in the mirror repulsed him. He had become something that ought to be banished to a cold castle up in the hills like some ghoul in the shadowlands, fleeing the torches, pitchforks, and villagers. Even this Frankie was unknown to him—a shadow of his former self with no charm to shield himself behind or to use as a weapon to his advantage. They were now both laid bare to one another in their ugliest forms at their cruelest trial.
'But I love you,' Frankie whispered. His voice grew louder as he said, 'I love you, Charlie Chance. I love you, and you love me. May God have mercy on me, I swear it that I do. I promise!'
Rather than feel the warmth of the words wash over him to embrace his own loving heart, they slashed his chest like slices of ice-cold barbed wire. They struck Charlie so viciously that he expected to bleed scarlet, the blood of his bleeding heart ribboning from his wrists and fingers to coil and dribble red onto the floor at his feet like scrollwork, sewing all his sorrows and regrets into it. It was feeble now to hear the words that he'd waited so long to hear, words that should've made him feel like dreams and colours and magic, but the foundations of them were brittle and tasted sour in his mouth. To dare say them now was an act crueller than anything Charlie had said tonight—or what Frankie had done to coax them from his breast, for that matter. For it was all much too late.
'That ought to blanket everything with beauty as winter does, shouldn't it?' Charlie slowly looked towards him with narrowed eyes. 'But why doesn't it? They should urge me to reach for you, but they don't. I feel nothing towards it. I don't even hate you for it. I am numb. And you and your promises are but dust and ashes to me now. I've discovered two untranslatable Russian and Greek words for you to add to your precious collection: Razbliuto and anagapesis. They mean—'
'I know what they mean.' Frankie bowed his head sadly. After a moment of quiet reflection, he pointed towards Charlie's bag at his feet. 'You must feel something for me, at least: you have my jumper still.'
'Habit,' Charlie replied, glancing to the sleeve of the mustard-coloured jumper hanging over the zip. 'Take it back.' He yanked it out and threw it at him, causing Frankie to sigh and bow his head again. 'And while we're at it, you can take this back and all.' He pulled the mustard-coloured scarf—his crown—from the bag, glancing at the charcoal-black one he had now wrapped around his head, as if all the colour was sucked from him like a black-and-white film. 'I found it in my drawer.'
'Keep it,' Frankie urged. 'At least keep something. So I'm not so expendable.'
'I don't want it.'
'I don't want it back.'
Charlie snorted his annoyance. He looked out the black window. 'Do you know where we are?' he asked.
'No,' Frankie replied absent-mindedly.
'No, me neither.' Charlie opened the window and let Frankie's scarf fly off into England somewhere, sliding across the side of the speedy train like a mustard-coloured ghost. He winced once he realised what he'd just done, his face blanching as he watched it disappear into the night. 'I—'
'It's okay,' he assured. 'I have loads more.'
'Of course you do,' said Charlie. 'You're all mustard and custard like your spine.'
'What can I do, Charlie? How can I make this right? Tell me what to do! God, why do I do the things I do?' Frankie cried passionately, the first spark of evidence that it was still in him. He was staring at Charlie, pleading with him, and Charlie could see tears in his eyes now. For a brief moment, the sight of them almost drove him into senselessness. 'I had my reasons at the time, as strange as they were, but it's a temperament I've been trying to rebuke. I didn't consider the consequences, just like most hell-bent, wayward rulers who tend not to council with the court. It'll sound gruesome to say frankly, but the pleb does not behead the king: only another foreign sovereign can unseat him as a usurper. And you, you were no commoner to me: you were my favourite jewel on the sceptre, until you became my throne and crown and mantle.' Frankie searched Charlie's face for a hint of something, his own soaked with sorrow and rage that he tried to wash away with a hand. 'In the moment, I felt that rusty old crown slipping, and I felt hesitant and reluctant. But overall, there was fucking breathtaking relief there, too! Omnipotence has become a burden if this is the price I pay for it. Please, Charlie. If you can tell me, tell me how I can get back to us. I would do anything within my power for us to be lying on the floor of Empyreal House again, laughing and as carefree as peasants.' Despite the heaviness of his sickness, his eyes grew stern and unwavering. 'I swear that I would gladly give up Eton for you.'
'I don't know, Frankie.' Charlie ran a hand across his cheeks. 'I can't tell you that.'
'I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to! It's almost ironic that I did it to stop Trevor Hamilton from destroying us, but then I ended up doing that all by myself! I'm such a fucking idiot! What the fuck is wrong with me? This bloody brain of mine!' Frankie thumped the side of his head with a fist. 'And now I feel all my filth when I look in your eyes ...'
'Stop that!' Charlie slowly retreated his hand from reaching towards him. To anybody else, it might've been such a marvel to see Frankie Carrozza disrobed of his suit of armour, the agonised Julius Caesar stabbed to death in the Curia of Pompey, but to see him beg for an end to his visceral pain—for the final stab of the twenty-third knife, perhaps, or to know if he'd see Rome again—made Charlie only feel slight pangs of guilt and compassion. 'And I ... and I don't mean to make you feel like that. But all I ever wanted was for you to let me in, and now that I've been invited into those depths, I don't quite think I like it there very much.'
'Do you still love me?' he asked, the question almost giving Charlie whiplash. His hands trembled as he rubbed his jaw, the skin still browned and his cheeks still reddened. 'Please, I just wish to hear it.'
'I love you.' There was a long period of silence as Charlie stared at his own ivory reflection in the window, his lips, nose, and ears glowing rosily. 'But I don't know you.'
Frankie threw himself across the carriage and onto his knees before Charlie, resting his elbows on his thighs so as to kiss him before Charlie could beg him not to do it. His face screwed up with hurt as their lips pressed together, but he didn't immediately push Carrozza away because a part of him still yearned too much for yesterdays. Their lips parted from their warm mouths to be greeted by the harsh winter that frosted the glass once they separated. Carrozza pressed his forehead against his, and Charlie opened his eyes to watch a tear slide alongside his nose. He'd have felt sorry for him had he the room for it. He frowned his regrets as their heads rolled side to side and their bodies writhed together. For as long as he could muster, Charlie pretended that they were no longer the ghosts of their story. Both boys knew what would happen once they broke touch, what was to come, and so they prolonged it and lived in its lie for as long as they could, holding one another in an embrace for a today that feared the tomorrows.
'When my mother told me that I was the best at keeping secrets, it made me proud. I don't know what's wrong with me,' Frankie whispered, his breath on Charlie's lips. 'Well, that's a lie: I do know what's wrong with me now. But that's no excuse. I'm sorry. I am so sorry for what I've done. If a higher power could only give me back the day I rue ...' Frankie repeated his apologies as he pressed his forehead and himself against Charlie, causing both of their heads to bow as though in prayer as he held him tight for keeps. 'Just remember me as I was in the good times, and like not this.'
'I know you're sorry.' Charlie stared at him, his body flushed with a flux of emotions—odium and temptation being the strongest—as he watched tears streak down Frankie's face, as silvery and as fine as gossamer. But still, sorries didn't have the power of resurrection: the rose was now a weed. I love you, Charlie thought dolefully. I love you so much. I love you so much that I can't stand to think that those words put a limit on it. I love you like winter loves the alleviation caused by spring, just as it does you. I love you like you love grave danger. But the boy who loves you died in the snow, and I am someone else. Instead of saying all of this, he simplified it by whispering, 'Frankie Carrozza, I would have followed you thoughtlessly up into the stars.'
Charlie leant back from Carrozza's hold, slipping through the cage of his arms and hands. The severance felt just like he'd feared: cast naked into a field of ice and night. And still, he could barely look at him now. He needed Carrozza to go away while he still had the strength and willpower to let him do so; it would be so easy to give into temptation, to hug his warm body and feel the simple solidness of his presence beneath his fingers once more as they soared out of Eton and ran from their lives. To think that he might never see those emerald eyes as the first thing he saw upon waking was making it terribly difficult for him to let this be their last kiss. As he said a long and silent goodbye, he almost stole another.
Once Frankie dropped his head and took a deep breath, he got back up and sat down on the seat opposite defeatedly, wiping his eyes with a hand.
Again, Charlie diverted his attention to the outside world. 'You don't know what it feels like to lose you.'
'That isn't true. Yes, I do.' He reached across to squeeze Charlie's knee with his fingers. 'If you leave, say you're coming back. Don't go and never return.'
'The thought of that happening appears to hurt you, but does it really?'
'Yes, it would. A lot.' Frankie took another deep breath. 'I let someone else drift away like this a long time ago, someone I cared about just as deeply, and I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't allow it to happen again.'
Then hurt, Charlie thought. As I've hurt.
Little flakes of snow began to drift passed the windowpane until it resembled interstellar, but they did not fall prettily. The world was finished—stars fell from their mirthful heavens, supernovas imploded, black holes formed to gobble the little lights of light left, galaxies ended, and the dying universe sung a quiet hymn until silence settled over a planet that awaited the oblivion coming. The night had removed all evidence of the mustard-coloured scarf's existence; it was the last physical cord strung between them both. Earlier that day, Charlie had collected all the copper pennies that he could find strewed about his room that Carrozza had left behind—to dapple the nightstands and bookshelves, to glitter on the carpet, and to warm in the sheets like a scent—and he'd scattered them from his bedroom window to shine in the cobbles and gutters below like a thousand wishes thrown into a fountain.
'They'll never hurt you like I do, Charlie. You said it yourself,' Frankie murmured, looking to him desperately from behind his hands. 'They'll never hurt you like I do. That has to count for something, oughtn't it?'
'Get off the train at Slough, Frankie,' he quietly said, just as the wheels began to grind to a stop. 'Get off, or I swear I'll derail us.'
With nothing else left to say, Frankie stood when the train pulled into Slough's railway station. He paused at the carriage door and looked back. 'I'll see you.'
Charlie only watched him leave with the heaviest of hearts, querying whether his last words were a question or not. He imagined Frankie Carrozza retreating to his country house down south for Christmas, the walls of the manor deeply ivied and deeply hidden in woods as he approached its snowcapped rooftops with all his melancholy, like somewhere in a fairy tale.
Their fairy tale had ended. The book had been closed. A match had been held to the integral pages of the pop-up storybook, and he could feel the pages aflame, all the hotness and pain as they curled and shrivelled with his papery heart. Two paper boys would've rose from the centre of the book had it been opened, as the flames singed the edges of the pop-up school and trees surrounding them, causing them to writhe in torment as the fire approached the two boys standing in the middle like shadow puppets, a misty smoke obscuring their view of the papery landscape as the ink bled blue and black like frost and night. The merciless flames would fold in the ragged corners of the book as it splashed over the copse, the hedges, the gardens, Eton rising, and the forlorn boy he left behind, to swallow them all up and out of view, melting everything into a river of ash and ink, as thick as blood, to bury it beneath the infernal aftermath, or to stream their entwined words off the pages completely.
Just as the train chugged onwards away from Slough with just him aboard, Charlie bent over, supported his elbows with his knees, burrowed his face into his palms, and finally began to sob.
When the north-bound train from London pulled into its final stop later on that night, he found his mother and father already waiting for him on the foggy platform, shivering in the cold and looking uncomfortable. As walked towards them, he attempted a glib smile that was as awkward as them. He dropped his bag at their feet, then threw his arms around his mother to hug her tightly.
'Oh!' he heard her gasp with surprise. Slowly and uncertainly, she wrapped her arms around him and hugged back just as fiercely. He even felt his father's hand patting his shoulders rather comfortingly. 'I've missed you quite terribly,' his mother whispered into his ear.
And that was all it took to break the absence spell—his need for them. In the fortnight or so that followed, they caught up and made up for all the missing years, visiting old bookshops and familiar places, having dinner on the promenade every other evening, and participating in deep and long conversations together just like a real family. Throughout a very festive and merry Christmas, the Chance family finally began to get to know one another entirely.
YOU ARE READING
The Taming of Frankie Carrozza
RomanceEton often said that Frankie Carrozza was dangerous. But of course he was dangerous: he was a teenaged boy, after all.
