Boy Caesar (3 page)

He left his mother to sleep. The alcohol had kicked in, and she lay face-down on the cushions. He placed his hand briefly in hers, knowing that at some stage of the night Gannys or one of
his equally duplicitous associates would force himself on her.

There were lights on all over the villa as he left his mother’s apartment and went in the direction of his own in search of Julian. Their brief affair, tempered by mistrust and the fear of being found out, would, he knew, end with his departure for Rome. Julian, with his privileged background, his fleckless green eyes and worrying nature, was studying law, and would doubtless in time become a respected barrister. Three years older than Heliogabalus, and with his father having taken up a consular appointment in Syria, Julian was determined to make his future in Rome.

When Heliogabalus went into his room he could smell Julian’s presence. He knew he would be hiding under the sheets, his skin slightly musty with pheromones and a scent that reminded him of the complex notes of vetiver as they came up in the masseur’s green-tiled parlour.

Julian pushed his head out from his hiding place as he heard Heliogabalus enter. He emerged like a diver, his hair tousled from friction with the sheets. His quizzical stare took in Heliogabalus with a mixture of fear and longing. He propped himself up on his elbows, his naked torso catching in the light, a leopard tattooed across his right shoulder.

Heliogabalus quickly undressed. Julian had always made him feel like a commoner, taking every opportunity to demean Heliogabalus’ family. He had in his assured, logical manner – and without intending to cause offence – stripped apart Heliogabalus’ claim to be an Antonine. The line had ended with Geta, he insisted, the younger son of Septimius Severus.

When Heliogabalus attempted to fit his body to Julian’s he could sense the resistance. Julian was somewhere else tonight and was not going to give himself without first expressing his feelings. He knew from experience that coming up against Julian’s body when he was in this state was like attempting to break into a mirror. He could make no purchase on its cold surface.

‘So you’re really going?’ Julian said in an accusing tone. ‘You must know it will all end badly. Reading Suetonius should tell you that. You can’t go to Rome as an impostor.’

‘Who is to say I’m that?’ Heliogabalus said defensively. ‘Besides, Macrinus has to be defeated first. You make it sound too easy.’

‘You don’t really believe that your father was Antoninus Caracalla?’ Julian persisted. ‘You know as I do that he was Sextus Varius Marcellus.You yourself once told me so.’

Heliogabalus swam an arm out across Julian’s chest. He could feel his friend’s heart turning over like a motor in its thoracic groove. The thought that it would stop one day caused him pain, in the way that acknowledging love demanded a corresponding acceptance of death. Julian would die, but whatever had passed between them would, he knew, continue to exist in some form of post-human context.

‘I have to prove myself to the soldiers first,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘It’s the part I’d rather do without. But if I do survive to be acclaimed emperor, then surely you can find a way to join me in Rome. It doesn’t have to be an end.’

‘Never,’ Julian replied, the force of his conviction allowing for no argument.

Heliogabalus felt the hurt go deep. He flinched inwardly. He took the refusal to be a judgement on the incongruous figure he would cut as emperor. Julian would not wish to associate with bad blood, even if the person was caesar. He lay there listening to him breathe in the dark, their sexual energies put on hold by bad feeling. He could sense Julian weighing resentment against desire, while his own cock remained obstinately hard, its impulses untamed by their differences of opinion. He knew that he should let go and turn over and have Julian make things right through the annihilative powers of sex.

Uncertain how Julian would respond, but willing to take the risk, Heliogabalus went under the sheets and took Julian’s urgently demonstrative cock in his mouth. He began fellating it, working on the frets like a guitarist playing the instrument with his tongue. Julian lay back and abandoned himself to Heliogabalus’ sensually improvised rhythm. He knew how to create little triggerings in his friend, as the first premonitory hints of orgasm. But this time he intended to leave Julian with no more than the anticipation of
coming and in this way encourage his lover to expand his repertoire of erotic play.

Heliogabalus disengaged and worked his head back to the air, leaving Julian with the excruciating ache of arrested orgasm.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he found himself saying, as their bodies interlocked in the dark. But, even in searching out Julian’s lips, he felt an underlying sadness that he knew would heal in time and be converted to a sense of painless loss. He had come to think of Julian, like he did of the mimosa, as a transient, intoxicatingly beautiful event in his life that belonged to a certain moment. The idea of him growing old or diseased seemed intolerable.

Aroused, Julian tried to flip him on his stomach, but he resisted, preferring to remain with his lips and to hold to their fierce, interrogative vocabulary. There was the enigmatic taste of Julian’s roots on his tongue, that mixed primal scents with the less definable signature of his psychic being. As they struggled to find deeper access to each other, he was aware of how easily love could be transformed into murder. The barely concealed animosity that lived as the subtext to Julian’s feelings for him was starting to be answered by his own sense of wounded pride. He resented being thought of as inferior on account of his illegitimacy. He knew it within him that he had a perfect right to be emperor, and the sleight given him by his friend caused him to be brutal in biting the tissue along Julian’s nether lip. Both manoeuvred for the ascendant position, but neither were going to concede to being fucked. The woman in him had taken offence and closed down the routes by which he usually gave himself with such abandon. Tonight he was going to resist Julian and suppress the fantasy he entertained of himself as a serviceable rent boy: a butch-haired faggot working the bath-houses in the interests of achieving in calculable numbers.

A frustrated Julian fought free of his embrace and sat up coldly. ‘Let’s forget it,’ he said. ‘There’s too much friction between us.’

Julian’s instant cooling shook him. He wanted to live on in his friend’s memory like a bruised emotion that took colour when it rained or when a particular mood invited reflection. First love, he
had been told, never died; but already he felt a tincture of hate for his resentful partner. It was a hatred so inseparable from love that he felt confused by the dual emotion.

‘You’ll end up nobody,’ Julian bitched, digging at Heliogabalus’ insecurity. ‘You see, sex will be the end of us both. We’ll be forced to marry, and the compromise will show. They’11 laugh at you if you get to Rome.’

Heliogabalus moved away from Julian and turned to face the opposite wall. This time he felt irremediably hurt and was determined to reject any attempts at reconciliation. Julian’s assertion that he would end up nobody had gone in deep like a twist of wire. If nothing else he had a purpose now: to prove Julian wrong in his spiteful prediction. He would be somebody and nothing less than emperor.

‘I think you should go home,’ he said, as a way of trying to defuse the situation. ‘I need to sleep and have an early start. Let’s not end on a bitter note.’

Julian got up abruptly, like somebody running back out of a sea that had proved too cold. He jumped off the bed, his erection still standing in line with his navel. His petulance showed in the truculent way he stood, the left hand angled to his hip, his chin raised as a token of rejection. His stormy attitude, whether genuine or affected, was the invitation to a potentially recriminative scene.

Heliogabalus made no attempt to have his friend reconsider. He watched him put on his clothes with the sort of indignant haste provided by a blow-out temper. Julian’s shattered hair was standing up spiky like a dahlia. Every cell of him was on alert, waiting for an apology that never came and which Heliogabalus was determined to withhold.

‘Shit on you,’ Julian seethed, as he fussed with his shoes. ‘You’ll be sorry for kicking me out.’

Heliogabalus remained silent. He wanted at all costs to avoid reproaching his friend. He knew he would suffer later for having said nothing and that the minute Julian left he would wish him back, but his mind was made up.

Julian made an attempt to correct his hair, picked up the two
books he had brought with him and without turning around hurried out of the room.

Heliogabalus stayed a long time without moving. He settled back on the pillows, stunned by his friend’s abrupt departure. It seemed to him that Julian had taken a chunk of the air with him in leaving, for the room was oppressively hot and he had difficulty in breathing. The atmosphere was still charged with the twitchiness of their recent hostilities. He wondered how he would be able to sleep in the aftermath of what had happened. He blamed Julian for having worked on his insecurity at a time when he was most vulnerable. Tonight, faced with the unnerving prospects of going to war, he had needed his unconditional support. That he had been denied it had come as a shocking reminder of the powers of betrayal. He felt as though a nerve had been cut in his body. He had trusted Julian, who in turn had repaid him by walking out with the calculated malice of someone intent on wrecking his emotions.

He wanted on impulse to run to his mother’s room and take refuge in her bed. Julian had succeeded in scaring up the sleepy chimeras garaged in his unconscious. They stared out like fat pythons sensing feeding time in a vivarium. Their fangs came searching along his spinal chord, jabbing him with current. In his state of panic he imagined himself being ridiculed by the Army, fumbling in his mount, jeered at for his unashamedly bleached hair. There was so much he had need of keeping under cover. He was acutely aware of his difference and of the need to manage it until such time as he could safely own to his true identity. The men outside in the dark, who had gathered together to logo his name as the last of the Antonines, were of a very different nature. He wanted nothing to do with their coarse masculinity and the values by which they lived. He would go out to join them, carrying a wound he could share with no one.

He called his assistant and asked for wine. His only option, he knew, was to drink himself to sleep. When it came, he drank half of the dust-covered bottle without questioning the contents. The wine tasted of fermented sunlight, with the planets involved in assisting its biosynthesis there in the ageing process. He felt the warmth
catch in his bloodstream and connect with his brain. His consciousness was slowly being dispersed, as the jungled underworld with its psychic guerillas closed over. His last jump-shot connection before sinking into sleep was the awareness of a black cube of night sky, lit up by the fires the military had built somewhere in the surrounding hills.

When Jim cut out of Borders, he headed for the Amato in Old Compton Street, Soho. The purchase he had made of
The Lives of the Later Caesars
linked in directly with the dissertation he was writing on the life of the emperor Heliogabalus. There was so little of a reliable nature written on his brief, scandalous reign between the years
AD
218 and 221, and all of it so coloured by the misassessments of Heliogabalus’ biographers, that he was glad of his purchase. The only two accounts in English of his life, a largely apologetic disclaimer by John Stuart Hay and a brittle exegesis by Orma Fitch Buder, had done little to redress the damage done by earlier historians.

It was a blowily cold April day. The thin turquoise sky over Soho was frescoed with meditative rain-clouds. Jim looked up at their slow crawl over the West End, their stop-and-start pace resembling articulated trucks tailgating the hard shoulder of a motorway. By the time he reached the Charing Cross Road entrance to Old Compton Street the shower had opened up in a rapid, torrential dazzle. The street was buzzy with its overtly gay community, and Jim made a hurried dash for his cafe.

He had planned to have thirty minutes reading time to himself before his lover Danny arrived. Danny, who was studying American Literature at King’s, was the drop-dead gorgeous love of Jim’s life. He pinned the thought of him with arrows and daggers to his heart and lived in an emotional storm of possession.

The café was lively with its student spill of Japanese girls, fastidiously dismantling millefeuilles with the studied elegance of a beautician shaping an eyebrow. Jim recognized the red-haired one, Uchiko and threw a smile at her before taking up with his book. He wondered about the process of reading and what sort of access it provided as a tool to jump across the centuries and handle blocks of deconstructed time. That Heliogabalus had become a fiction, a
character in part invented by his biographers, was clear to Jim from reading the contradictions inherent in the works of Lampridius, Cassius Dio and Marius Maximus. Nowhere described physically (did he have blue eyes, green eyes, brown or grey?) and correspondingly deprived of any form of psychological reason to account for his actions, Heliogabalus had been reduced to little more than a set of facts by his contemptuous biographers.

Jim chewed on the notion of history as continuous fiction, an area of study with which he was increasingly preoccupied. If he was to retrieve Heliogabalus from a past to which he had no proper access, then it was necessary in recreating him to make him real. In writing about his subject he would have to earth him in the London milieu in which he worked and lived. That way he hoped to get a better purchase on the youthful emperor he was reincarnating for the purposes of his dissertation.

Taking advantage of the time left to him in which to read, Jim got under way with passages lifted from Lampridius’ lacerating account of Antoninus Heliogabalus’ short and extravagantly flamboyant rule. Beginning with an apology for being so imprudent as to commit Heliogabalus’ scandalous life to writing, the author lost no time in alluding to the young emperor’s sexual tastes. After wintering at Nicomedia he was supposed to have conducted himself ‘in a depraved manner, being debauched by men and being on heat’ to such a degree that the soldiers regretted ever having taken his side against Macrinus.