Boy Caesar (16 page)

He continued running, tripped over on his face, got up again and zigzagged his way across a clearing. The rain was coming on hard, and he was soaked through, but he was off again, this time in a different direction, the whistles cutting in behind him and the shower steadily increasing.

He thought of the warmth and safety of Masako’s studio and of his need to get back there. He cursed Danny for the trouble he had landed him in and kept on running. He had never before realized the effects of darkness and the way it came up as a tangible wall to impede his progress. It felt solid as it opposed his body, like he
was up against a resistant mass of grainy energies. Whenever he advanced, he felt immediately displaced and thrown back on himself, his tracks reversed. His hands were cut by brambles and his clothes torn by snagging branches.

He made a sudden detour and reasoned that if he continued in one direction he was sure to meet up with the road. He went left again, up steep ground overhung by hawthorns, and made out lights in the distance. He didn’t know at first if they were headlights from passing cars or windows sunk in houses, only he needed to reach them and fast. He slowed his pace now that he knew he wasn’t being pursued and longed only to be out of the night and the blinding rain.

The ground was slippery under foot, but he was determined to find his way and get his bearings. He wondered if Danny had stayed behind with Slut and been taken off by the Heath Police to the station. He didn’t care, and the night’s proceedings confirmed his belief that Danny was into a dangerous scene.

Jim reckoned he must be up high, probably behind Squire’s Mount, and hit in the direction of the road ahead. He came down a side path into a quiet street and guessed from the landmarks that he was somewhere in Frognal, up above the High Street. He stood under a streetlight’s halo and read the name Branch Hill posted on a wall. His clothes were dripping, and he thought of himself as someone who had swum across one of the ponds and emerged as a night-chilled amphibian trailing a slimy signature across a residential precinct. His trousers looked like fatigues, and there was a long tear incised in the left sleeve of his jacket. His normally elegant appearance had been trashed by his encounter with the Heath, and he shuddered from what he recognized as a travesty of himself. The shower had lifted, its massive chandelier had been drawn up into the sky, and he took advantage of the break in the downpour to organize his thoughts.

He needed to find a taxi and get out of the district. His middle-class values ruled out the possibility of taking the tube in such wrecked clothes. He had no intention of being viewed in this disordered state and made whatever repairs he could to his appearance, while sloshing a defeated trail down the hill.

He was confused, too, as to how much he should tell Masako about what had happened. It all sounded so improbable, the idea of him having been kidnapped and taken to the Hampstead woods to witness a crucifixion. It would be almost too much to ask of her to believe that such bizarre practices took place at night in London. Besides, he felt guilty about his involvement in the ritual and knew that he had only just narrowly missed being arrested. He had let himself go and wasn’t sure where in the proceedings he would have stopped. He knew he had let himself down, and the rain doubling again provided a fitting soundscape to his mood. His sense of dejection was acute as he stood in Heath Street looking to left and right for a taxi. He could have let Masako know he was all right by using his mobile, but he decided not to, preferring instead to tell her the edited highlights in person.

Jim cursed the misfortune that had brought him to this and blamed Danny for his involvement with the group. To console himself, Jim thought of taking Masako with him to Rome and of getting away from it all. Going there, he hoped, would be like cleaning his blood and making a new start.

He stood outside the tube station and waited disconsolately for a taxi to show. He no longer cared about the downpour, he was too destroyed by the night’s experience, too shredded by the whole thing. He thought of going back to his own flat to clean up, but the idea of being alone was intolerable.

He could hardly believe his luck when a taxi strolled down the hill, its amber light swimming through the rain. He threw up his hand just in time, and without consulting the driver jumped into the rear.

‘You looked half drowned, mate,’ the cabby joked, before taking Jim’s instructions to head for Soho.

Against all advice, he had gone ahead and married Hierocles. That Rome had taken the matter seriously bit into his sleep as he sat up in the empty dawn hours, listening to a subdued roar surf over the city.

Sometimes, when he awoke before daybreak, a nerve resonating in his unconscious told him he had gone too far. While he couldn’t locate the exact source of his unrest, he knew it existed somewhere within the modalities of his confused gender. He had risked a same-sex marriage, despite it being regarded as a violation of taboo by almost everyone, including the Army. And that he had insisted his bride dress as a woman had been considered detrimentally faggy even by the gay community.

Hierocles had taken to going out at night and sometimes not coming back for two or three days at a time. Heliogabalus had grown to despise Hierocles for his reckless hedonism, and propped up on a couch, counting his thoughts, he wished him dead.

He thought of Nero, who had been terrified to go to sleep for fear of encountering those he had murdered in his dreams, and now insomnia had overtaken him, but for different reasons. He had committed no atrocities in his reign, but pacifism and a refusal to become involved in political issues had turned the Senate against him.The one war he could have staged – against the Marcomanni – he had refused to initiate on the grounds that Commodus had subdued this state by Chaldean magic and it was dangerous to risk lifting the spell. He stood by his decision, proud of having avoided a bloody offensive.

Giving up all attempts at sleep, he took himself out to the terrace and looked up at the shattered stars exploded across the galaxy. It would be light soon, and his thoughts were busy with the coming day’s agenda. He reminded himself that he was due to address a convention of rent boys later in the day and that he was to be given
first choice from a priceless cargo of silks recently arrived from China.

He was drinking already, but he didn’t care. His mind raced with buzzy data. Finance, he assured himself, was stable. Under him the government had increased its volume of credit by depreciating the standard of the currency. Gold was still relatively pure, and he had succeeded in keeping the weight of the aureus at 6.55 grams, no mean feat given its significant reduction under Caracalla.

He was about to go inside and fetch another bottle when he felt Hierocles’ hand on his shoulder. He could smell the alcohol on his breath as an undeclared roster of drunken nights. He knew the procedure backwards now, his lover’s appeals for forgiveness, followed by the usual vicious recriminations that he was being used and forced to live in the emperor’s shadow.

This time Hierocles looked ravaged by the scene. He was losing weight and the story of his nights was written in his face. Heliogabalus didn’t like the look of this waste: it seemed to cut to the bone like the inroads of plague. He turned away as Hierocles searched for the obligatory drink and went inside to collect a bottle, seething with a catalogue of hidden reproaches he felt bound to contain. He realized their relationship lacked the contrast of opposites, that it was one fired by an attraction to each other’s shadow. They had no shared culture, no proper meeting-point, and the conflict of their interests struck a succession of ugly chords.

He came back to the terrace carrying a bottle black as storm. Hierocles had thrown himself on a couch and looked bruised by the orange rift of light that had broken over the eastern suburbs. The cloud-break looked like an orange being peeled slowly, and Heliogabalus searched the horizon for his temple, which dominated a cluster of multiplexes.

This time he was determined to avoid a scene. He promised himself he wouldn’t get involved in arguments even if Hierocles wound him up. He would play dumb and let it go.

They drank in silence for a while, and he could feel all his worry rubbed to attention by Hierocles’ wasted presence. If he missed anything, it was home, despite the opportunities that Rome provided.
He was emperor of everything and nothing. Time, he knew, lived in his arteries and was self-limiting. When he told himself that, the world disappeared, together with his power. It was a subject he couldn’t discuss with Hierocles without things getting nasty.

Without warning Hierocles turned on him with one of his recurrent accusations. ‘They’ll kill me, too,’ he drawled. ‘When they come for you, I’ll be hacked to pieces. Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve set me up, you shit.’

Heliogabalus let it go. The bitterness of the complaint contained a truth that stung him with its force. He had no answer to the charge and no defences.

‘You’ll be the death of me,’ Hierocles continued. ‘You trapped me in this rotten marriage. We’ll both die like dogs as a consequence.’

Again Heliogabalus refused to get involved. He knew that if he set his anger off he would explode with all the weight of frustration, displacement and political pressure to which he was subjected. Instead, he looked up at the canyons of mauve and pink clouds as they flooded through with light. In his head he ran over the blueprint of what he intended to say to the assembled rent boys and let Hierocles continue to sink himself with drink. They were both alcoholics, only he made a better job of concealing it.

‘I’ve been with Paul,’ Hierocles got out. This confession, intended to provoke, was also aimed at giving him kudos in his lover’s eyes. ‘You’re a blond faggot,’ he cut at Heliogabalus. ‘You’re too much of a girl for my liking. Give me them rough …’

Heliogabalus bit his lip, thinking that focusing on the pain would help screen him from the insult. He worked his teeth in deeper and felt the probe draw blood. However hard he tried he couldn’t free himself of a bond in which hate was inextricably tied to love. Being the recipient of hatred, he realized, was in a way like depriving the bee of its sting. He knew from habit that it was only a matter of time before Hierocles started the usual tirade about being straight and how he had been corrupted by his partner.

The arguments always followed the same pattern and never found a satisfactory resolution. Sometimes the woman in him needed to be hurt, but this time he wasn’t prepared to give Hierocles the
advantage. He looked on cautiously as the alcohol, far from knocking his lover out, seemed to have shifted his consciousness to a trickier plane. He could sense the whole dodgy arrhythmia of his friend’s thoughts, the impulses looping instead of creating an established beat. He wanted to be free to sit with the generous morning light before going to worship, rather than face the trouble Hierocles had dragged in from the night.

He could have got up and walked away, but guilt kept him rooted to the spot. What held him there was the fear that if he made a move to leave he might return later to find Hierocles gone for good. It was a terror he lived with and one that ruled his life.

So far his plan of non-retaliation was working. He knew Hierocles was regularly unfaithful but, even so, reminders of it hurt. He couldn’t care less about Paul or the hundreds of others and had come to accept that same-sex relations rarely observed a code of fidelity, but what he had hoped to experience with his partner was the sensation of moments lived together, bright, tangy and polished as a lemon. Instead, their relationship had devolved into a series of psychological manœuvres, in which each tried to make the other dependant through jealousy.

He watched Hierocles attempt to stand up then collapse back on the couch. Reading his thoughts, he went back inside and fetched another bottle, hoping that this time the wine would take effect. He dreaded Hierocles throwing still another scene that would be heard all over the building. Their rows had become proverbial for their epic proportions and for the hailstorm of broken glass and terracotta that accompanied them.

As he opened the bottle he told himself he had to clean up his life. Already there had been attempts to depose him and, while these had been instantly suppressed, he knew he wouldn’t always be so lucky. His policy of selling government positions to opportunists, and of pushing his own god at the Roman people, had made him enemies. He reflected on this, glad of the brief respite from his lover, and felt the invisible wound he knew to be the assassin’s mark open in his jugular vein. He didn’t know where the idea came from, but he had the premonition he would be hit there.

He went back outside and poured with a shaky hand. The city was visible now beyond the grounds, its architecture appearing to have been assembled overnight like a filmset. He could never get over the magic of the experience each day, watching the urban skyline swim back into place through the mist, while he sat on the balcony arrested by the thrill of it all. It was so special that sometimes he imagined he was dreaming with his eyes open and that if he closed them the vision would fade.

Hierocles was operating on automatic. Something within his consciousness wouldn’t quite shut down but kept reconnecting like a faulty lead. Heliogabalus watched him feel for words like someone searching for keys, and with the same scrambled effects.

‘You’ll be the death of me,’ he managed to say, directing a red-eyed stare at his lover.

This time Heliogabalus poured himself a drink. Given the options at his disposal, he wondered why he subjected himself to such an ugly relationship. It could only be love he reflected, for sex was available to him all the time. Something within him told him that he couldn’t live without Hierocles. The idea of losing him was insupportable.

The sky had coloured a hectic strawberry-red, shot through with flocked blue, and he looked forward to a break in the stormy weather that had persisted without let up for days. Antony briefly appeared on the terrace, but he waved him away, preferring to deal with the situation alone. If glasses started to fly, he didn’t want to put Antony at risk of being hit.