Boy Caesar (9 page)

When Jim awoke to a foggy grey sky roofing the West End he immediately felt the pain of loss. He had the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that reminded him of vertiginous Boeing drops
en route
from London to New York. He had the sensation that he had been bounced from a great height and still hadn’t managed to find his feet. But he was absolutely clear in his decision. He would, of course, miss Danny, but he didn’t want him back. He realized he only knew half the man, and the rest was something he didn’t like. Duplicity reminded him of a knot that could never be untied. You straightened out one kink only to be presented with another and another. There were millions of Dannys all over the city, living out double or multiple lives. Jim had encountered this pattern before, and he was determined to put a stop to it before it became a strangle hold. Even if Danny came looking for him he would refuse him entry. He was quite clear about it in his mind. He also needed to work single-mindedly on his dissertation and broker the way to a clearer interpretation of Heliogabalus’ commentators.

He made himself breakfast. Tea and toast. A smoky lapsang souchong and rye bread oodled with Frank Cooper’s Vintage Marmalade. The pop on the radio was tinny with smudged lipstick songs, floaty hooks that spoke of broken hearts and the vocabulary of teen hang-ups. None of it stuck with him, and instead he busied his mind with ideas about Heliogabalus to sound against his tutor. When his mobile went off, perversely he let it go, suspecting that his voicemail would confirm that it was Danny.

As he sat with his tea he tried hard to wipe the image of Slut from his mind. The picture of the blindfold, wounded sex-god kept coming back to him like a plague carrier. He didn’t want the man anywhere in his life and felt nothing but abhorrence for his values. The idea of taking a short break in Rome occurred to him, both as a means of distancing himself from Danny and of visiting the city in which Heliogabalus had ruled.

From his window he could see a magnolia toppling in the nearby gardens. The pink conical flowers had been burned by the unseasonal cold or mashed to a rot by the continuous rain. He tried to imagine Heliogabalus looking out on his grounds all those centuries ago and perhaps also noting a drift of pink petals catching with the wind. That life comprised a series of optimal moments, always recollectable but often eluding analysis, was, he knew, the key to understanding psychological history and the part played by the individual in its recurring patterns. His way into his subject’s life was through the multiple gateways leading to the psyche. The rest of history as he knew it had derealized.

Pouring himself more tea, he asked himself the fundamental question, one that was sure to come up: why Heliogabalus? According to Dion, the duration of the reign, which terminated on 11 March 222, was three years, nine months and twenty-eight days, although the figures applied only to the time that Heliogabalus was in Rome. That Heliogabalus had managed in such a short time to stamp his individual signature on history, given that no facts were recorded of his life prior to his becoming emperor, was what had drawn Jim to his subject. Heliogabalus lived on as an image coded into the collective, a pre-pop icon who seemed somehow to have been committed to film. And the way the film rolled, scratches and all, from century to century, its contents continuing to come up, was what he found fascinating. By rights Heliogabalus should have disappeared in the food chain of forgotten characters over the centuries, but he was still there, demanding attention.

He knew his choice was an unusual one, and his tutor had remarked on the relatively limited sources available for research. It was the fact that Heliogabalus was a poet rather than a politician in
his behaviour and that he had tried to transform government into theatre that held Jim captive. There was also a loose theory of his that found affinities between the youthful emperor and the subversive life and work of the schoolboy poet Arthur Rimbaud. He had drawn attention to the fact that Heliogabalus’ term of office corresponded in years to the formative state in youth, fourteen to eighteen, in which Rimbaud had attempted in a series of hallucinatory poems to recreate the universe according to his imagination. It mattered to Jim to make the connection, no matter how tenuous. He believed that both had acted out of a similar visionary impulse.

The rebel in him also identified with Heliogabalus’ policy of degrading governmental posts. As a means of undermining the self-importance of most officials, the emperor had put unqualified people into senior jobs. A dancer had been appointed prefecture of the guard; Gordius a charioteer, prefect of the watch; Claudius, a barber, had taken over the Ministry of Agriculture; and rent boys were pushed into the Senate. Jim regarded these anarchic gestures as belonging to the theatre of the absurd, as well as examples of the emperor applying favouritism to some of the lowlife he had met through sexual encounters.

As Jim understood it, Heliogabalus had attempted to overthrow the system. He was an emperor who had substituted the heterodox with the unorthodox, the heterosexual ideal with its homosexual counterpart and the regenerate with the degenerate. His actions had mirrored the cultural entropy at work within the empire itself and as such were symptomatic of the times. He had exposed the sugar-rot at work in the Senate and found it to be a form of ideological diabetes. Jim laughed to think that the same corruption was at work today. He was only too well aware that nothing created a stronger sense of moral self-vindication than an establishment able to divert attention from its inconsistencies by pointing up the shortcomings of the opposition.

Jim let another incoming call go, as he reflected on the inveterately negative core at the heart of all politics. This time the caller had left a message, and he punched in digits to retrieve his voice-mail. As he had suspected, it was Danny, but there was no sense of
apology or attempt at reconciliation in his tone. The message was cold and brief. ‘Slut’s looking for you. Watch out.’

Jim felt a ripple of fear go through him like a guitar chord, and the riff ran up and down his spine before subsiding. He played the message once again and saved it for reference. He had anticipated hearing a marginally contrite Danny but instead had encountered a voice loaded with threat. The contempt in it stayed buried in him like a knife.

He went back to his place at the kitchen table and looked out at the splashy April clouds. Even if Danny intended to scare him as a joke, the undertones were clearly malicious. The image of Slut that he had tried so hard to suppress swam back into view, the wounds on his body reopening as the perverse stigmata of the sexual outlaw. He saw the image so intensely that it was like the man was standing in front of him in the kitchen, the blindfold in place, the damage cut into his skin.

Rather fantastically he began to wonder if he wasn’t the recipient of some sort of voodoo hex put on him by Slut’s cult. The hallucinated quality of what he was seeing lived like fire in his mind. He tried to dissociate from the image each time it came up, but without success. Slut was in his head, securely locked in there like a zoo creature in its cage.

In the effort to free himself Jim tried to concentrate on his work. He looked out of the window where blue windy patches had opened up in the sky again in between toppling constructs of cumulus. He thought of calling a friend but knew it was too early to talk about his break-up and the weird goings on he had witnessed last night.

He worked his way back to the idea of Heliogabalus and the nature of biography as fiction. That the emperor was the victim of bad press and had become the subject of largely apocryphal anecdotes went without saying, but the question remained as to why Heliogabalus’ conduct should have appeared so scandalous to a generically decadent society. Even if his search for the man behind the fiction was frustrated by historians writing to gain favour at the time, the level of acrimony was still disproportionate to the vehicle at which it was directed. He had no doubt that Heliogabalus had
been the victim of a homophobic assassination. The atrocities committed on his dead body – which had been chopped up, placed into a sewer and finally thrown into the river – were undoubtedly the actions of vindictive gay-bashers. That he had been denied a burial and in effect fed to the fish, despite his being popular with the people, was further confirmation of the ephemeral place he occupied in history.

Jim decided to stay with this theme of the absent body as one to present to his tutor. What additionally puzzled him was the way Heliogabalus had been denied any form of psychological motivation by his biographers. He had been factored to a formulaic set of sensations, in which there was no subtext to account for his actions. But to Jim’s mind what distinguished him from the likes of Commodus, Caligula and Nero seemed to be not only the mystery surrounding his life but also the relative lack of violence in his character. Unlike Nero, whom he emulated in terms of spending the state fortune on himself, he was without the pathology that had made Nero into a serial killer. He had read in Suetonius that Nero, after having killed his mother, put her naked body on display, so that he and his friends could comment on the shape of her legs, the curve of her bottom and the size of her breasts. If Nero was a psychopath, then Heliogabalus was a benign ruler who was known to have put only one person to death during his reign, despite a series of rebellions aimed at deposing him.

Jim put this down to gender and Heliogabalus’ acceptance of his homosexuality. While Commodus, Caligula and Nero had all openly engaged in same-sex relations, they had done so with a vicious edge of misogyny quite different to Heliogabalus’ unashamed pursuit of his own sex. Gender, then, was a definite angle to his thesis and one that would provide a controversial focus to the subject of men marrying men. There was also the confusion created by Heliogabalus having reputedly married three women, two of them old enough to have been his mother and the third one of the Vestal Virgins, who were part of a religious order responsible for guarding Rome’s sacred fire. The complexity of the emperor’s emotional life, which combined incest with bisexual tendencies, was a complete psychological
study in itself. What he aimed to do was to rehabilitate Heliogabalus in contemporary terms. Nobody to his mind could relate to a past that wasn’t in some way linked to the present. His own work was being done in a small West End flat, the windows grilled by pollution, and the whole sonic overdrive of the city collecting as noise in his head. He was conscious, in writing terms, that his subject was directly involved in the variables of his biochemistry and in the fluctuations of energy he brought to the work, together with their opposite – periods of disillusionment in which the work was temporarily abandoned. He had got Heliogabalus in his blood, and he liked it that way. He was confident, too, that he would coerce his supervisor into seeing things from his point of view.

Still feeling unnerved by the night’s proceedings and the subsequent threat he had received from Danny, he decided to call in and see his friend Masako on his way to college. Like many Japanese girls based in London Masako was sold on fashion and pop. With her fringe dyed pink and blue and her clothes comprising Topshop-retro and bottled Miss Sixty jeans, Masako had joined the hundreds of thousands of young Japanese who had chosen to make London their home. Still wired from the cyber-ethos of Tokyo Masako had found in London a basis from which to free herself of the inherited traditions of Japanese family life. Here she was free to explore the pop capital and date Western men as a welcome antithesis to their Japanese counterparts. Her fashion degree at St Martin’s was going well, and she lived in a studio in Frith Street, a space loaned to her by a friend who had returned to Tokyo for a year.

Jim called in advance to say he would be stopping by and headed off on foot across the city. With the tube network in a state of chronic dysfunction, he preferred to avoid the Underground and had taken to walking almost everywhere. London was on the way to becoming a Yardie-infested war-zone, its tensions throbbing in the conflict between an outmoded capitalism and a populace who had taken to arming themselves. Shootings had become a regular occurrence, and the Prime Minister’s armour-plated Jaguar with its shatterproof black glass – a state-of-the-art vehicle that was able spray oil slicks and throw out smokescreens to shake off pursuing
attackers – symbolized the fortress security needed to protect a discredited autocrat from warring factions. The PM had often eluded assassination by having a dummy substituted for him.

Jim hurried into the continuous pour of the London streets. He had quickly discovered on coming here that London provided more stimulus in an hour than a year spent elsewhere. Above him the clouds seemed to interface the buildings, their massive skyscrapers forming a city above a city in endlessly agglomerated suburbs that continued as far as the eye could see.

He made his way along a traffic-blasted Euston Road in the direction of Cleveland Street, its constricted artery still carrying undertones of the nineteenth-century gay scandal that had shocked society to its bleached roots. He imagined, as he walked down that road, the Victorian glitterati leaving their cabs waiting outside in the street as they ducked out of the brown rain into the discreetly signposted male brothel. He thought of Prince Eddy, screened by a UFO-shaped umbrella, giving the entrance code to the boy on the door.

He continued across Fitzrovia, connecting up with Charlotte Street and aiming to cross over Oxford Street into Soho. London was characteristically spacy with its offloaded commuters coming out of the Underground. He didn’t know why, but an acute feeling of vulnerability came over him as he walked down Charlotte Street. He had the unnerving suspicion that something bad was about to happen. Most of the restaurants were still closed and, apart from a courier having difficulties in finding in an address, the street remained relatively quiet. There was a couple sitting huddled in their coats outside a café, the girl appearing affronted by something her partner had said.