Saving Francesca
Table of Contents
For Luca
and
the St. Mary’s Cathedral College boys
. . . and for the girls there, too . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mum, Dad, Marisa, Daniela—thanks for the whole Grand Central Station experience.
To my mum, Christine Alesich, Barbara Barclay, Marcus Burnett, Anthony Douglas, Philippa Gibson, Laura Harris, Damian Hatton, Janet Hill, Sophia Hill, Genevieve and Olivia Hill (for typing out your mum’s notes), Brenda Hokin, Annette Hughes, Brother Eric Hyde, David McGuigan, Michelle Patane, Mark Roppolo, Aaron Taranto (and Wade, although you weren’t supposed to read it), Francus Vierboom, Julie Watts, Kate Woods, Maxim Younger, and Toby Younger. Thanks for your advice about the manuscript or for writing ten pages of notes for me or feeding my ego or inspiring me with your own writing or pointing out the difference between a pipeline and a grind pole.
Thanks also to Beth Yahp, Teresa Crea, and Agnes Nieuwenhuizen for giving me the opportunity to create fragments of Francesca over the past ten years in your anthologies and performance piece.
chapter 1
THIS MORNING, MY
mother didn’t get out of bed.
It meant I didn’t have to go through one of her daily pep talks, which usually begin with a song that she puts on at 6:45 every morning. It’s mostly seventies and eighties retro crap, anything from “I Will Survive” to some woman called Kate Bush singing, “Don’t give up.” When I question her choices, she says they’re random, but I know that they are subliminal techniques designed to motivate me into being just like her.
But this morning there is no song. There is no advice on how to make friends with the bold and the interesting. No twelve-point plan on the best way to make a name for myself in a hostile environment. No motivational messages stuck on my mirror urging me to do something that scares me every day.
There’s just silence.
And for the first time all year, I go to school and my only agenda is to get to 3:15.
School is St. Sebastian’s in the city. It’s a predominantly all-boys school that has opened its doors to girls in Year Eleven for the first time ever. My old school, St. Stella’s, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn’t allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn’t bring me up to have limitations placed upon me
.
If you know my mother, you’ll sense there’s an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life
.
My brother, Luca, is in Year Five at Sebastian’s, so my mother figured it would be convenient for all of us in the long run, and my dad goes along with it because no one in my family has ever pretended that my mother doesn’t make all the decisions.
There are thirty of us girls at Sebastian’s and I want so much not to do the teenage angst thing, but I have to tell you that I hate the life that, according to my mother, I’m not actually having.
It’s like this. Girls just don’t belong at St. Sebastian’s. We belong in schools that were built especially for us, or in co-ed schools. St. Sebastian’s pretends it’s co-ed by giving us our own toilet. The rest of the place is all male and I know what you’re thinking if you’re a girl. What a dream come true, right? Seven hundred and fifty boys and thirty girls? But the reality is that it’s either like living in a fish-bowl or like you don’t exist. Then, on top of that, you have to make a whole new group of friends after being in a comfortable little niche for four years. At Stella’s, you turned up at school, knew exactly what your group’s role and profile was, and the day was a blend of all you found comfortable. My mother calls that complacency but whatever it’s called, I miss it like hell.
Here, at Sebastian’s, after a term of being together, the girls haven’t really moved on in the sorority department. I don’t exactly have friends as much as ex–Stella girls I hang around with who I had barely exchanged a word with over the last four years. Justine Kalinsky, for example, came to Stella’s in Year Eight and never actually seemed to make any friends there. She plays the piano accordion. There’s also Siobhan Sullivan, who uses us as a disembarkation point for when one of the guys calls her over. In Year Seven, for a term, Siobhan and I were the most hysterical of friends because we were the only ones who wanted to gallop around the playground like horses while the rest of the Stella girls sat around in semicircles being young ladies. Most of our free time was spent making up dance moves to Kylie songs in our bedrooms and performing them in the playground until someone pointed out that we were showing off. My group found me just after that, thank God, and I never really spoke to Siobhan Sullivan again. My friends always told me they wanted to rescue me from Siobhan, and I relished being saved because it meant that people stopped tapping me on the shoulder to point out what I was doing wrong.
Tara Finke hangs out with us as well. She was the resident Stella psycho, full of feminist, communist, anythingist rhetoric, and if there is one thing I’ve noticed around here, it’s that Sebastian boys don’t like speeches. Especially not from us girls. They’d actually be very happy if we never opened our mouths at all. Tara’s already been called a lesbian because that’s how the Sebastian boys deal with any girl who has an opinion, and because there are only four ex–Stella girls, I assume the rest of us get called the same thing. I could get all politically correct here and say that there’s nothing wrong with being called a lesbian, but it all comes down to being labeled something that you’re not. Tara Finke thinks she’s going to be able to set up a women’s movement at the school, but girls run for miles when they see her coming.
The girls from St. Perpetua’s, another Year Seven to Ten school, make up the bulk of the female students. They don’t want to get involved with Tara and her movement because their mothers have taught them to go with the flow, which I personally think is the best advice anyone can get. My mother is a different story. She’s a communications lecturer at the University of Technology–Sydney, and her students think she’s the coolest thing around. But they don’t have to put up with her outbursts or her inability to let anything go. If it’s not an argument with the guy at the bank who pushed in front of us, it’ll be questioning the rude tone of some service-industry person over the phone. She’s complained to personnel at our local supermarket so many times about the service that I’m sure they have photos of my family at the door with instructions to never let us in.
Every day I come home from St. Sebastian’s and my mother asks me if I’ve addressed the issue of the toilets, or the situation with subject selection or girls’ sports. Or if I’ve made new friends, or if there’s a guy there that I’m interested in. And every afternoon I mumble a “no” and she looks at me with great disappointment and says, “Frankie, what happened to the little girl who sang ‘Dancing Queen’ at the Year Six graduation night?” I’m not quite sure what wearing a white pants suit and boots, belting out an Abba hit, has to do with liberating the girls of St. Sebastian’s, but somehow my mother makes the connection.
So I come home ready to mumble my “no” again. Ready for the look, the lecture, the unexpected analogies and the disappointment.
But she’s still in bed.
Luca and I wait for my dad at the front door because my mother never stays in bed, even if she has a temperature over 104 degrees. But today the Mia we all know disappears and she becomes someone with nothing to say.
Someone a bit like me.
chapter 2
I WAKE UP
to silence. No songs about surviving. No songs about boots meant for walking. And then, after a moment, I hear her being sick in the bathroom. For a moment I’m relieved because there is a symptom. I wonder if she could be pregnant, but it’s too strange a thought. She’s only been at the university for over a year, and she worked hard for so long to get the position. Mia would have been careful about jeopardizing that.
Later, when I get out of bed, my dad is in the kitchen and he looks at me and tries to force a smile. My dad’s a builder and I love that about him. His name is Robert and my mum calls him Bob the Builder. They’ve known each other since they were my age, so they’re kind of like best friends. He’s a bit immature, and I know that some of my mum’s friends think she should have outgrown him years ago. Some of his friends joke around that he should never have let her go and get her masters, as if the control was all his. It’s what I love about Bob the Builder. He doesn’t give a damn what his friends or family say. He doesn’t give a damn that his wife has a dozen more degrees than he ever will. He works for himself, refusing to expand because he reckons it will change everything. I think my dad just likes what he does and who he is. Sometimes my mum and her friends ask each other what they’d do if they had another life. My dad’s answer is always the same. He’d marry a girl called Mia and they’d have two kids.
Whatever this thing is with my mum, I don’t think it’s cancer or anything, and it certainly isn’t pregnancy, because my dad would probably be ecstatic about that. Today he just looks tired and confused.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
“She’s just a bit down. Go get Luca out of bed.”
I’m not quite sure what “just a bit down” means. I’m “just a lot down” and I’m getting out of bed.
“Did you have a fight or something?”
They are eternal arguers. She is the Queen of Hypotheticals and he’s the master of not thinking beyond the next moment. She believes that if she doesn’t challenge what they stand for, they’ll end up like other couples they know.
“Take away your job and take away your kids and who are you, Robert?” she asked once, over dinner.
“Your husband,” he said, in what she calls his droll voice.
“Then take away me and who are you?”
“Take away you, the kids, and my job? Is this a trick question? I’m dead, right?” He asked, “What are
you
if we take away all those things, Mia? Can
you
be you without all of us?”
Luca was looking from one to the other.
“Must you talk about this in front of the children?” I asked.
“You think too much and you analyze too much,” he’d tell her. “Everything’s fine. The kids are happy. We’re happy. Everything’s fine.”
Mia would do that a lot last year. Analyze stuff to bits, contemplate the meaning of life. My nonno had died suddenly the year before. One minute he was watering his garden, next minute he was dead from an aneurysm. “A piece of me is gone,” she told me once while we were bra shopping. “I think we’re made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you’re left with less of yourself.”
A woman with a big bust had my breasts cupped in her hands at the time, so I wasn’t much in the mood for a philosophical discussion and I didn’t respond. I do that a lot. Even if she asks me a great question. It shits me that she can keep me interested. Most of the time she’s right about me and what I’m all about, but once,
just once,
I’d like to come up with a Francesca theory before her.
“Eggs?”
My father holds two eggs in his hands and I’m back to reality. I don’t eat eggs. Nor does Luca. But I don’t have the heart to tell him that.
Later, Luca and I go into their bedroom to say goodbye. She looks tiny, huddled under the blankets. Sometimes I forget how small she is because she is so vocal. She’s kind of like a dynamo who does one thousand things at once, successfully. This new Mia, I don’t know. She looks sick and helpless and, worse still, vulnerable. As we walk out, she stirs but she doesn’t even look at us.
I go to school with a sick feeling in my stomach, and I dare not look at my brother’s face because I know that I’ll see on his what he can see on mine.
Tara Finke corners me as soon as I step into homeroom.
“Today’s the day,” she says, waving over one of the ex–Perpetua girls, who chooses to ignore her.