Thirty Years before the fire
‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been one month since my last confession and this is my sin. I had sex, last night.’
Fran had selected the 8.30 am as no-one she cared about ever went to the 8.30 am. Also, she’d heard a rumour that Father Frank was doing it this week. She’d heard a great many rumours concerning Father Frank: that he had decided to marry God rather than a beautiful girl from Brighton called Tina, for example; and that he had been offered a contract with the Bombers but had said no, again because of God; and that he was a good guy.
Fran couldn’t imagine him landing a beautiful girl called Tina, and had never once seen him kick a ball, but he did seem like a good guy.
He arrived at the parish three years prior, fresh out of the seminary, twenty-seven years old, clean cut, 5’8”, and massively into (talking about) sport, which got everyone on side immediately.
At first, the young priest followed The Mons around, looking like Robin next to an imposing Batman. Soon after, he graduated to being second chair to Father Alfonzo at the 10.30 Sunday mass.
Father Alfonzo was altogether less striking than The Mons. He was middle-aged, no Italian olive in his pale-to-yellow skin. He had two extra chins, wore his belt below his sagging 158stomach and stuck the few streaks of hair remaining across his head using Vaseline. If he pointed his head at the sun long enough, it’d catch fire. When Father Alfonzo and Father Frank did mass together, they looked like they were a creepy uncle and his cute nephew.
During that period, Father Frank sometimes performed mass alone, but only in emergencies, like at Easter when there were simply too many services to service (although he would never have landed the Friday 3.00 pm gig, the biggy, the biggest, the grimmest of the year; when you had to stand in line and kiss Jesus’s feet; and as well as eating Jesus meat you also had to drink Jesus blood. It went on for hours and hours. Afterwards, all the shops were closed, including the Servo and Gallagher’s and even The Red Lion, and everyone was really down because Jesus had just died. The Mons always did that one, in a special dress.
Fran witnessed Father Frank perform his first funeral a year ago (another emergency, as there were an unprecedented number of burials that week, what with Chrissy and her mates careering into the Old Mill.) He was good, Fran thought. Everyone cried the right amount. The rumours were correct: he was a good guy. He was definitely ready to fly solo when Father Alfonzo ‘left’.
Initial reports were that Father Alfonzo had ‘left’/‘moved north’/‘moved sideways’ because he ‘needed some rest’. It was not long, however, before more information became available, and community discussions on the grandstand went more like this:
Father Alfonzo’s been charged with touching up kids.
Father Alfonzo anally raped a seven-year-old altar boy in the vestry. His name is James and he’s started speaking out.
Shh, we do not talk about these things.
Father Alfonzo is a paedo cunt and should burn in hell. 159
Shoulda known, shoulda fucking known, creepy pervert prick, fucking kill him, we should all fucking kill him, let’s go, shall we go?
Oh come on, for goodness sake, we know nothing, leave poor Father Alfonzo alone.
Father Alfonzo masturbated a boarder in his bedroom in the presbytery. He and brother Colin took turns in the cinema room. Everyone knows what they’re called, the boarders they abused – they’re called the projector-room boys.
He’s not even Italian, he just chose an Italian name, Alfonzo, I mean who the fuck would do that, choose a wog name, fucking paedo.
After Father Alfonzo ‘left’, young Father Frank took over the parish. Since then, everything had improved, including grandstand chat, which now went something like this:
Saw our PP without his dog collar again – what is he like?
He asked me to call him Frank.
I saw him swimming in the old reservoir.
He often has dinner with us.
Loves a good lamb chop.
You can tell him anything.
Fran was surprised, therefore, at Father Frank’s response to her confession:
‘You did WHAT?’
‘I had sex, on the oval, at least I think that’s what it was.’ She waited, nothing. ‘With a boarder.’
‘You think it was the oval?’
‘Ha, no, I think it was sex – as in – ual intercourse.’ The curtain was closed, she couldn’t see him without moving it, and she decided she’d better not.
His chair squeaked, then again. ‘Did the boy insert his penis into your vagina?’ 160
She was taken aback by his official language. ‘Insert?’ She was having a think. ‘I s’pose that’s what he did.’
‘He put his erect penis into your vagina?’
She was also surprised by his sexual language, before quickly realising why he was interrogating her thus. ‘Yes, then out again but not right out, in and out like that a few times, if you know what I mean … you might not.’ Fran was not being obnoxious. She was actually recalling the strokes. She now understood that the young priest’s questions were necessary; that her penance depended one hundred percent on the details.
‘Brazen hussy; that’s enough of that.’
She’d have to ask her dad about those words, they sounded old fashioned, but he’d probably involve the encyclopaedia and go into the Latin origins for ages. She’d do it herself. ‘Brazen’, ‘hussy’, remember to look those up. They probably weren’t good, considering the priest’s tone.
‘Did you use contraception?’
‘No,’ Fran said. She wasn’t worried about contraception. Her mum had taken ages to get pregnant the first time, and couldn’t ever again. Fran was pretty sure she’d be barren and that an experience as shitty as the one she had could not possibly result in a child.
‘Well, I suppose that’s something at least,’ said Father Frank. He paused again; his chair squeaked again.
Fran was wondering who’d be outside when she opened up – maybe The Boarder. She hoped she hadn’t spoken loudly earlier. She hoped no-one had heard. Could anyone hear?
‘Say ten Hail Mary’s and ten Our Fathers,’ said Father Frank, ‘and I suggest you control yourself from now on and stay well away from boys.’
‘That’s going to be hard, Father. I’m starting at the college 161in two weeks, there’s only twenty of us and there’s five hundred of them.’
‘Fifty Hail Mary’s, twenty Our Fathers and…’ Fran didn’t hear the last one. He’d slammed the shutter shut.
She was able to take Father Frank’s advice for the following fourteen days. She stayed in the house, pretending she had a sore back, too scared to see anyone because they would all have heard by now that she was a ‘shameless Lolita’ (she had found the priest’s slurs in her dictionary, and had also needed to look up ‘Lolita’). Every hour, at least, she checked the mustard phone in the kitchen for the dial tone. It was working. There was no technical reason, this end, why Tricia Gallagher had not returned her calls.
She even refused to go with her dad to the city to get uniforms, and hence ended up with a summer dress that was four sizes too big and a blazer that was one size too small.
‘You mean the girls are supposed to wear the dresses as short as that?’ her dad said.
She was sobbing too hard to answer him. The blazer made the dress bunch up everywhere, and took away arm movement. Her dad couldn’t sew. She couldn’t sew. She was doomed, doomed.
Mrs Verity O’Leary ‘popped by’ the following day, and to everyone’s surprise had her sewing machine and all her kit in the boot. Her dad must have told someone in town, and word got around. The dress was better, but Fran was still doomed, as she discovered on the first day of school.
162She refused to take the short-cut along the fence on the Ryan side to the footy fields – which would take a relaxed ten minutes at most. She would arrive like everyone else, at the front entrance. Her father drove her, attempted to kiss her on the cheek, then left immediately as promised. ‘You are not waiting and looking at me.’
She stood at the first oak of the avenue and took a breath. A new start. This was going to be amazing.
Tricia and the other form-five girls were in the quadrangle, and she realised too late that none of them were talking to her. She was standing in their circle and everyone was silent and looking the other way. After saying ‘is everything okay?/this is weird/what’s the matter?’, and getting nothing back, Fran made her way to the assembly, holding back the tears as Father Frank and the new principal, Mr William Dickens, waxed lyrical about the college. Females had arrived. This was a new era, a fresh start.
Her first class was physics. She arrived early, and watched as boys filed into the room. It was almost full, and so far, she was the only girl. Fran was nauseous as she watched the door, and thought she might faint when The Boarder waltzed in.
‘Hi,’ she said as he walked past.
‘Hi,’ he said, taking a seat at the back.
‘Is that the one?’ she heard someone say, then some boys laughed and one of them decided on the nickname she would go by henceforth: ‘Hey, Mountain Slut, meet me at the oval after school?’
‘Ignore them.’ The boy next to her had spoken. He was pretty and geeky, scratched his red arm all the time, didn’t look like he belonged here. ‘They’re dicks. I’m Ollie.’
At recess, Ollie showed her his hiding places. He’d been a boarder here since form one and knew everything. The new 163netball court was going to be great. ‘If you’re here taking shots, no-one’ll necessarily know you haven’t chosen to be alone. Plus, no man would be seen dead with a netball.’ Neither of them looked natural at solo goal practice, but they could work on it. ‘Lunchtime clubs are good too,’ he said. ‘Only victims go to clubs at lunchtime.’
She joined chess and badminton.
At lunch, she and Ollie talked under the grandstand. He made her promise to remember that they’re all just abandoned and horny, and that that can make a lad crazy. She didn’t see him for the rest of the day, and she was glad. It was even more depressing with him, somehow.
In biology, she counted the minutes till the bell. She had ordered her father to collect her, but now realised buses would be out front in the afternoon. Buses filled with boys and girls that might see her. When the bell finally rang, she walked as fast as she could to the grandstand, then along the paddock to her house, howling. Her life was over.
It wasn’t, obviously. Not until May.
‘Quiet, quiet boys and girls,’ said Sister Mary Margaret, who was standing on the stage in the convent hall, addressing the pupils in front of her. There were at least eighty boys to the nun’s left, and twelve girls to her right, including Fran and Tricia. The pupils had marched from the college to the convent hall in order to undertake their first co-ed dancing class.
‘I have a very important announcement,’ said the nun. ‘Quiet, okay. The formal, as you know, is a week on Saturday, and I am very excited to let you know that we are going to be joined by top-quality girls from St Martin’s in the Pines…’ 164
Dozens of boys made raucous happy sounds. The Micks from the Sticks. The Moles on the Poles.
‘Quiet! As well as the gentlemen from St Patrick’s.’
A dozen girls made happy sounds. Apparently they were nice, the boys from St Patrick’s in Ballarat. She’d heard the same.
‘All of whom will be travelling a great distance, all the way from Ballarat, in buses, to join us. We must therefore impress them and will be practising every day until the dance. Are you ready? Girls, please take a seat.’
Fran and the other girls sat on the chairs at the side of the hall.
‘Boys, please choose your partners.’
The other girls, who had not uttered a word to Fran for three months, had decided that today was the day they would change over to their winter uniforms. They all wore long tartan skirts, white shirts, blue jumpers, ties, and blazers. Fran was the only one with her legs showing, and the only one who was freezing cold. She had goose bumps on her legs. At the same time, her head was hot and her palms were sweating. The boys had formed a line, and were coming. Most would choose no-one as a dignified way out. For the rest it was first in, first served.
Where was Ollie? She needed Ollie. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t here.
As the boys walked past, many greeted her similarly: Mountain Slut, three times by the lake, can I have a blow job, slut.
She realised a lot of the other girls were getting it too; and that most had nicknames by now. Fiona was Pog (pig/dog), Maria was Truck (looks like one ran into you), Margherita was Greasy Wog. 165
The Boarder didn’t say anything when he walked past all the way to Tricia Gallagher, who he pointed at – up.
Tricia had been chosen. She took The Boarder’s hand and glanced at Fran. She was very pleased with herself, Tricia.
Thankfully, Rory McDonald had arrived. ‘Would you do me the honour?’ he said.
Everyone hated Rory because he was really bad at sport. Fran thought he was fun.
They were doing the Dashing White Sergeant. ‘What’s that?’ said Rory.
‘What?’ The song ended; she was out of breath.
‘On your dress.’
Fran looked down and saw that her uniform was wet. ‘Weird, is there a leak?’ She looked up at the ceiling, then realised everyone was staring at her.
She stepped back from Rory. There were two large round wet marks on her chest.
Her breasts were leaking.
She made it to the cubicle just in time.
‘Are you okay?’ Tricia Gallagher’s first words since the Blue Light Disco.
‘I’m fine.’ She wasn’t; and she wasn’t able to vomit quietly.
‘You can talk about it. Everyone saw,’ Tricia said.
Fran rested her head against the side wall of the cubicle. She leaned into the bowl and vomited again.
‘Francesca? I think we need to talk. Francesca!’ Sister Mary Margaret was knocking on the toilet door.
There was a high window above the loo. She stood on the seat – it wasn’t only unlocked; the handle was loose. She 166pushed with her head, careful not to scrape or squeeze her growing tummy as she edged her way out.
The puddles along Ryan’s Lane were often icy in July. Fran took her time each morning, picking the best one: the roundest, the thinnest, the most transparent. She’d chosen well this morning. The lush winter grass looked even greener through it. She held the ice in her gloved hands and continued into town. It had melted, of course, by the time she reached the monument.
‘Morning!’
It was Henry Gallagher; he scared her to death. He and his wife Shirley were doing some gardening at the foot of the tower. This route was safe this time of day. They had no business being here at 8.45 in the morning. Henry had a shrub, which he was planting in front of the photo of Ollie.
‘So sad, this poor wee boy. Did you know him?’ Mrs Shirley Gallagher asked.
‘I did,’ Fran said.
‘You have to wonder what can lead to such despair,’ said Henry.
Despair all right. Two months earlier, while Fran was escaping the toilet window, Ollie was on the lookout, taking forty paracetamol, drinking two bottles of whisky, then throwing himself off head first. He didn’t leave a note.
‘When are you due?’ said Mrs Gallagher.
‘Two months-ish.’
‘You want a lift into town?’
‘It’s quicker to walk; thanks, though.’
‘If there’s ever anything we can do,’ said Mrs Gallagher. ‘I’ve got an old buggy.’ 167
‘Of course, great.’ Fran wished people would stop shoving help in her face all the time. She upped her pace. She had exams looming. She needed to get a move on.
Fran studied alone in the living room of the convent. She’d pass fifth year, she would, then she’d never have to think about school again. The room was damp and dusty and cold, the open wood fire the only heating, and no-one ever lit it. Fran’s only escape from this room was if help was needed in the sick bay, or if she had an appointment there herself. Sister Mary Margaret, as well as being competent with music and dancing, was a nurse.
Today, Fran was required to help in the ‘waiting room’ (the kitchen) at the end of the day. None of the children was seriously ill and they therefore had too much energy for Sister Mary Margaret to bear. She had paperwork to finish, final medicines to dispense.
There were four of them today: a boarder who’d hurt his arm playing footy, a ten-year-old girl who had a bad headache, and Johnny, who was very particular with his cut-outs, perhaps because he didn’t have enough breath, or bugs, to do it over if he made a mistake. He looked impossibly sad for a seven-year-old.
‘Are you worried about something?’ Fran asked him.
‘I am,’ he whispered. He was very dramatic.
‘What? You can tell me.’
‘I don’t like getting my photograph taken,’ said Johnny.
Tears were in his eyes and Fran was immediately sad herself. This poor wee boy. ‘That’s not something you need to worry about,’ she said, meaning it absolutely, and taking 168the spider he’d just cut out from a magazine. ‘Whereas this spider!’
Johnny’s eyes lit up. ‘He’s going on the lid.’
‘He is not.’ She helped him stick it on.
Sister Mary Margaret was calling for Johnny. The little boy gave Fran that sad look again and headed to the door.
‘Ten minutes on the nebuliser and you’ll be right as rain,’ said the nun.