Sarah Lean - Harry and Hope

Harry wouldn’t look me in the eye, but then again he never did. Not even with Frank. In fact, Harry always looked kind of sad, and that was probably because of the way his head drooped as if there was something heavy on his mind.

The words to describe Frank and Harry are those that anybody would understand: best mates. The best way to describe what Frank was to me is like this:

One day a man (I forget who) came over to our house to see Frank about getting some carpentry work done. I was outside and so was Frank, who was painting the shutters, and the man said hello to me first, and then he saw Frank climbing down from the ladder and said, “Can I speak to your dad?”

And I said, “He’s not my dad, he’s my…” and couldn’t finish what I was saying, even though that wasn’t what the man thought was important right then. My mouth was still open, ready to say a word that fitted exactly right after ‘my’, but Frank was already striding over holding out his big brown Australian hand, which had paint on it, and he wiped it on his jeans first and said, “I’m Frank, what can I do for ya, mate?”

Marianne told me my father was an art dealer. I’d never met him so I didn’t miss him because I didn’t know him or what there was to miss. He didn’t fit with us and I suppose we didn’t fit with him either, so I was OK with that. But me and Frank, we’d never filled in the blank about who we were to each other.

It took ages for Peter and me to get Harry to go to the meadow. In the end, I think he made up his own mind to go.

Peter and I wandered back to the house talking about what we thought everyone might be doing up at the avalanche and I noticed that Frank had left his door open. I wasn’t ever supposed to go in without knocking and never had, but I was sure he hadn’t meant to leave it open.

As I closed the door, through the gap I saw a pile of clothes on Frank’s bed.

For a minute, something like that makes your mind do all sorts of things. Like adding things up. Passport, half-packed bag and… what else? Just a kind of uncomfortable feeling.

I ran up to the roof.

“Where are you going?” Peter said, running up after me.

“To see.”

Because of the plane trees, we couldn’t see the casot or where the snow had fallen from there. Most of the land belonged to the Massimos and Peter was quiet until he said, “Where the snow fell, that was where the new vineyard had been planted.”

I wanted to feel something about what he said, but I couldn’t. I wanted to see something else other than Frank’s travelling bag and the passport in his pocket.

When Frank arrived home later, Harry headed straight back up from the meadow and went over to the jeep, walked all the way around it and then followed Frank.

I hung back.

“Was anyone hurt?” Peter asked, running up to him.

“The casot helped stop the avalanche,” Frank said. “The snow’s wedged up behind it. It’s smashed up a bit but it looks like nobody was up there.”

“It doesn’t matter about the casot; nobody’s used it for about fifty years,” said Peter.

“The new vineyard… it’s under the snow too,” said Frank softly.

Peter’s shoulders dropped. His family wanted to make more wine and more money, give more people jobs. The soil and the sun and the vines and the Massimos all fitted together perfectly up here too.

“New things will grow,” Frank said. “They always do.”

“Was Nonno OK?” Peter said. “He gets tired easily.”

Frank smiled at Peter and touched his shoulder. “I gave him a lift home.”

“I’d better go back. I want to see him.”

“Peter! Will I see you before you go?” I said.

“Ciao, Hope! See you in the summer,” Peter called as he ran.

“Family comes first, hey?” Frank said.

I was still standing on the porch not knowing what to say.

“Frank?” I caught his sleeve and asked him. “Are you going somewhere?”

Moments passed while he seemed to measure out the right amount of words to say, while I hooked my fingers together around his arm.

At last, he said, “Nonno has asked me to help with digging out some of the vines and posts from the snow, see what we can salvage of the new vineyard. Might take weeks, or more.”

“You’re not going anywhere else?”

“Like I said, I’m needed here.”

Had Frank been about to leave? If it hadn’t been for the avalanche… I looked back at Canigou. I knew I had always been right about my giant friend: that it stood by me, no matter what.

“Come and help me light the fire,” Frank said. “We still got some talking to do.”

My mother turned out the lights in her studio upstairs, which meant that Frank, Harry and I were the brightest things on the hillside, made amber by our fire.

Frank went inside and brought out some papers to throw on the fire, and we collected up the old rotting bits of wood that he’d been sorting out earlier to burn. I leaned on him, hooked one leg over his so he knew I wanted to sit in his lap.

“You’re really comfortable to sit on, Frank.”

“You’re getting kinda big,” he said after a while.

“I’m not heavy though, am I?”

He laughed. “Big on the inside.”

I sat on a shorter log next to him.

“I’m cold now,” I said.

He gave me his sheepskin jacket. Sheep were the warmest creatures, he’d once said, and he thought it was mad that millions of them lived in the sweltering heat in Australia, which was where Frank was born. Wrapped in his jacket was kind of like being Frank, or at least part of him, smelling of fire smoke and the outside and long journeys.

I leaned my head against his side. Harry came over and blinked from the heat of the fire.

Frank threw old papers into the flames. The little burning pieces shot into the sky and made us our own kind of fluttering stars. Flakes of the burnt papers fell towards me as they died in the sky. I caught one and it made a soft grey mark on my palm.

“We gonna talk?” Frank nudged me and I didn’t answer for a while, probably like him, weighing up what I did and didn’t want to say.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. It wasn’t like him to go first. It was usually me spilling over with questions. “What you said earlier about cherries.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” I smiled into the fire.

“I get it.”

“I know. I never knew anyone before like you or Harry.”

We were both quiet again after that.

Everything turned to shadows when the sun fell behind Canigou, making the sky bright blue around our mountain’s shoulders. I had a different feeling, of being held up like a piece of washing on a line by a flimsy wooden peg.

“Spill,” Frank whispered.

Perhaps it had always been hard for him too. I wanted Frank to understand what I didn’t know how to say. That even if my mother and he didn’t want to be together, that somehow we’d still be each half of a pair, even if there wasn’t a word for us.

The only reason we’d all come together in the first place was because of Harry. Harry’s life hadn’t all been happy, but if it wasn’t for that donkey, none of us would ever have met.

I nudged Frank and he squinted one eye in that here-we-go-again kind of way but with an added ton of patience, because he knew what I wanted to hear.