Boy Caesar (10 page)

Jim was half-way down the street when he froze. Coming towards him, looking like they had stepped out of a doorway, were two clones whom he recognized from the St Anne’s Court gathering. Dressed in their uniform leather and denim, and with conspicuous nose, eyebrow and lip piercings, they stood out by way of their trans-species ugliness. Jim didn’t have time to cross over, and the two men, forming a solid resistance, refused to let him pass. He found himself face
up against the opposition, which parted only after one of the men had bitten his ear.

It had all happened so fast that Jim reeled from the pain and shock. He instinctually put his hand to his ear and, although the bite had been a superficial one, a trickle of blood ran in thin branch-lines across his fingers. When he turned around the two men had disappeared down a sidestreet.

He stayed rooted there, paralysed by fear. He felt powerless to act and at the same time angry with himself for having been so passive. A part of him wanted to give chase and confront his antagonists, but he knew without doubt that he would come off worst and might even get seriously injured. Nobody had witnessed the attack, and it had been done with a speed that was breathtaking. He knew for the first time how it felt to be the victim of assault. There was no help at hand and nobody to whom he could turn. There was just the terrifying realization that he was all alone in the big uncaring city. Being jumped was something he had always dreaded, and now tasting the raw reality of it he felt he had let himself down. He told himself he should have seen it coming and got out of the way. Even more excruciating was the realization he had been set on by his own kind. Luckily the wound appeared to be shallow and the blood loss minimal. He played briefly with the idea of checking into casualty, before deciding against it. He had received a tetanus injection a year back, and if the risk was HIV then there was nothing he could do about testing at this stage.

With the fear of infection needling his mind, he crossed over Oxford Street into Soho. He was in a hurry to get to Masako’s and tell her his story. His whole life seemed to depend on getting there without delay. He had never before been so conscious of the separation of mind and body. In his head he was already there. It was the physical that let him down and the sheer impossible size of the city.

The Soho streets were already busy, as he cut through Bateman’s Buildings on his way to Frith Street. He had picked up in these alleys at night and was surprised at how different they looked by day and how demythicized of their sexual contents.

He arrived at Masako’s flat to find her only just emerged from
the bath. She was dressed in a black T-shirt and predamaged blue Levis slashed over the knees. Her hair was still wet and, always the observer of cute details, he noted that her toenails were painted turquoise.

Seeing he was in a state she had him sit down and went into the kitchen to make tea. Jim settled on two cloud-shaped shocking-pink cushions in his usual place under the skylight. Looking up at the grey sky gave him a little hit of calm before Masako came in with two mugs of herbal tea.

Now that he could relax for the first time since the incident had taken place, he realized he was still in shock. He was shaking inside and he could feel an involuntary twitch under his left eye. More frightening was the feeling he had been cut off from language. The words he needed wouldn’t come up in his brain.

Masako, who was all sensitivity, let him be. She, too, stared up silently at the spun-sugar vocabulary of clouds moving in a convoy across the sky. To Jim the skylight was like a meditation-point, and the more he stayed with it the calmer he grew. He sensed words slowly coming back as a communications tool. A switch had been thrown, reactivating patterns.

‘I got bitten on the way over here,’ he said, hurrying his speech. ‘Two men blocked my way in Charlotte Street, and one of them bit my ear. I can hardly believe what I’m telling you.’

‘You mean now, on the way here?’ Masako gasped, incredulous.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not badly hurt. It’s more the shock,’ he managed to say.

‘But who are these guys?’

‘I don’t know. But I should probably tell you about what happened last night.’

‘Mmm,’ Masako encouraged, her jeans revealing her bare midriff and the little turquoise chip in her belly-button.

‘What I’m going to tell you sounds weird, but it’s true. Last night Danny persuaded me to go with him to a place in Soho, where a group of adepts – for want of a better word – were meeting. Well, I had no idea that Danny was a part of all this, but I’ll come to that later.’

‘Go on.’

‘The worst part of it was when a man called Slut was introduced into the room. He’s some sort of numbers freak from Hampstead Heath. I don’t want to shock you, but men go there at night to take part in anonymous sex. Slut sees himself as a hero to a cult who engage in numbers.’

‘I hope Danny’s not into that.’

‘I think he is, and I’ve left him. But let me go back to last night. The two men who attacked me a short while ago were there, and they must have recognized me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I clearly intruded on something secret last night,’ Jim said, ‘and when I saw that Danny was so much a part of the cult I walked out. This morning he left me a threatening message, telling me that Slut was looking for me and that I’d better watch out.’

‘Mmm, kinda scary,’ Masako said.

‘I’m not going to be intimidated,’ he defended himself, ‘but I wonder if I shouldn’t go away for a while. I was thinking of Rome, as a visit there would be helpful with my research.’

‘I’m not sure if you shouldn’t go to the police. Do you want me to look at your ear and see if it needs dressing?’

‘I’m fine,’ he pretended. ‘It’s only a scratch. I’d rather avoid contact with the police at this stage.’ Inwardly he felt his reserves collapsing, and wondered why he remained so rigidly defensive. The fear in him was beginning to map out its territory and settle to a nervy alert. He visualized it as an animal on guard.

‘You can stay here for a while,’ Masako said, ‘if you need a place for a few days.’

Jim considered her offer before replying, ‘No, I’ll be all right, really. I’ve got my work at home, and I don’t want to blow the thing out of proportion.’

Again he found himself acting contrary to his needs, by allowing an innate sense of perversity to go against his best interests. He knew he should take up Masako’s offer of a temporary refuge and stay undercover until things blew over. It would be by far the best solution. But instead he was once again making himself vulnerable by refusing help.

‘I’ve got to see my supervisor later this morning,’ he said. ‘It’s an important meeting, as I’ve got to justify the angle I’m taking on the subject.’

Masako suddenly pointed up at a black cloud that was filling in the skylight with its density as it dragged over. To Jim it looked like Africa being stretched across the sky. One of the little games they shared was to find similarities between the shapes of clouds and geography. It was something they had done all one autumn afternoon, when the cloud arena was constantly changing and being driven by a tail-wind.

‘Looks like China,’ he said.

‘Mmm,’ Masako concurred. ‘But it could be America. Let’s see what follows it.’

Jim momentarily lost himself in the game, as he let his mind dissolve into the cloud masses. For a brief time it seemed as though Danny had never existed. The moment was closed to all other associations but those of the game.

‘You sure you don’t want to come back tonight?’ Masako asked.

Jim continued to think on the idea and of the complex set of emotions he felt for Masako. That they were friends had never ruled out the possibilities of a deeper involvement, and he was sufficiently flexible to know that being gay didn’t mean he could only have relationships with men. He enjoyed the romantic undertones to the friendship they shared and the excitement implied by the fact that anything could still happen. Masako was pretty, boyish and possessed the sort of aesthetic sensibility he found so attractive in Japanese girls. A combination of inherited and adopted values, the mix providing a refreshingly new take on life, particularly in a city as historically present as London. It would be easy for him to become involved with Masako, and he had every reason to believe that she would be sympathetic to his continuing relations with men.

As Masako busied herself with making more tea for them, he had a serious think about coming to stay. A change of address would, he hoped, put Slut and his associates off his trail. He still couldn’t for the life of him think why he should be of any importance to the group. He had witnessed only the preliminaries to the
night and had nothing on the participants. There appeared no reason why he should be singled out in this way, unless, of course, it was Danny’s doing. The shock that his ex could be behind this hit him hard. Although Danny had been cold of late there had been no hint of a break in their relationship.

When Masako came back into the room, he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to stay here for a few days. It would do me good and help take my mind off things.’

Masako settled to a mauve cushion on the floor and smiled in her usual taciturn manner. It was a gesture as protective as it was well-meaning. He knew that from habit and was glad in himself that he’d made the decision. He liked her ambience and the delicate signature she had impressed on the studio. There were parrot tulips arranged in a vase on the table, beside a number of books and fashion glossies, the black beret she wore out in the rain and a glass bowl full of Shiseido lipsticks and other items of makeup. Her CD collection was racked in the far corner of the room, and the dynamic generated a feng-shui sensitivity to arrangement and comfort.

It was raining again in fast sequences. The skylight sounded like someone was bunching tissue paper. April in all its blotchy unpredictability had moved into the city, muddying the river and stripping the parks of blossom. Jim could never find the same comfort in spring rain as he did in its autumn counterpart. There wasn’t the sense of settling in that October rains brought but more a feeling of skittish electric surprise.

The hot tea was a comfort, while he faced the prospect of having to go out soon to meet his supervisor. A quick fifteen-minute dash through the rain would get him there, before the business began of arguing his case. Despite the set-back he had suffered he still felt sufficiently fired up to win his cause.

Masako had to be out and about in town that day and told Jim that she would be back at around five o’clock. She gave him the spare set of keys to her flat and promised to cook for him on her return.

He braced himself to face the downpour and, feeling a lot more secure in himself, hurried out into the Soho streets in the direction
of Bloomsbury. He made rapid progress. A black cab thugged its way through segueing traffic towards Centre Point. There were young people tented in sleeping-bags on the pavement. An outpatient manifesting delusional symptoms was conducting a run-in with himself outside the Dominion Theatre. The man’s aggressive body language complemented the distraught emotional arena he was in the process of addressing. Jim gave him a wide berth and headed up Oxford Street. A gang of youths wearing obligatory baseball caps were busy hassling an innocent bystander and he decided for safety’s sake to make a detour down a sidestreet. London with its warring interzonal factions had become the least tolerant of all major cities. Yob culture with its accompanying street crimes had spread like a pathogen through the city’s dangerously mismultiplying cells. Jim thought of London as an urban jungle, its populace only a fraction away from exploding into organized warfare.

He made his way by detours into Gower Street, the rain giving over again and being replaced by a watery blue sky. The air was fried all along the main concourse by traffic pollution. A truck driver was leaning out of his cabin haranguing a young woman behind the wheel of a scarlet BMW. Their road-rage dialogue ripped across the dual-lane traffic before the woman sped away at the lights.

Jim arrived at college to find his supervisor waiting for him in his room. Martin King was a fortysomething academic, sometimes pedantic but more often laid-back and wonderfully unconventional in his approach to history. While trying to steer Jim away from too psychological a take on his subject, he was none the less committed to treating history in part as fiction. While his business wasn’t to authorize Jim to write a novel about Heliogabalus, he was sympathetic to blurring the boundaries between history and imagination.

Martin was casually dressed in a charcoal lambswool V-neck and lived-in jeans. His particular clothes fetish was the wearing of impeccable leather shoes, polished like a car to a waxed gloss. Jim checked for the reassuring characteristic in his supervisor; a man who was so consistently private that he had never succeeded once in penetrating his defences. They had never drunk together or met each other off campus.

Jim was still nervous from the morning’s events and kept on feeling his mind go blank. He was terrified of losing his natural eloquence at a time when he most needed it. He didn’t want to concede territory to Martin and knew that he had it in him to hold his own. He was starting to experience the hot flushes he dreaded, and for a moment the room seemed to up-end like it had somersaulted.

Martin seemed not to have noticed. He was busy switching attention from the database he had been surfing and confronted Jim with the fazed look of someone going through the motions of returning to real time.

‘How’s Heliogabalus?’ Martin asked, telescoping Jim and his subject into one character. ‘It’s the first time in my experience anyone has chosen to write about him. I’m looking forward to your dissertation.’

‘I’m still struggling with the concept of separating fact from fiction,’ Jim said, conscious as he spoke of the selective faculty he brought to language when addressing his tutor.

‘I think we have in part to dispense with the reliability of sources in your case,’ Martin said. ‘Whether, for instance, the
Augustan History
was the work of a single writer or a number of biographers is more the subject of bibliography. Much of the controversy surrounding Heliogabalus’ life comes from faked documents anyhow.’