The White Devil (7 page)

“You’re rather biting this evening,” said Persephone.

“The plot,” Fawkes continued, “is simplicity itself. Byron, dying of a fever in Greece, finally reveals who of all his many, many sexual partners was the love of his life. Sort of a literary Rosebud. Not half bad, actually. The least of my worries.”

“What are your worries?” asked Andrew.

“Yes, what worries?” asked Persephone, growing anxious at Fawkes’s tone; she caught the odor of anger and abandon in everything he said; the sarcasm of a man who moments ago had been ready to run. “What are you on about, Fawkesy?”

“I have only three concerns,” he answered. “The beginning, the middle, and the end.” He tossed back his drink.

“So who was it?” Andrew asked. “The love of his life, I mean?”

“I . . .” Fawkes broke off in a bitter laugh. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“You never told me that,” Persephone said, hurt. “I thought it was Augusta, his flesh and blood, his Sieglinde.”

“How could you not know how it’s going to end?” Andrew blurted.

“It’s just that nothing makes sense,” Fawkes exclaimed, rising, warming to the subject. “Does anyone want another drink?” They didn’t. He went to the kitchen. They heard an ice tray snap. Andrew watched Persephone. Her brow furrowed: she had not been expecting this. Andrew felt a kind of relief.
Not everyone here is perfect
, he thought.

“Thing is,” Fawkes resumed from the kitchen. “Byron at twenty was not a bad poet. His poems weren’t unpleasant to read. But they were conventional.
O wilt thou weep when I am low
. Buh
bah
, buh
bah
, buh
bah,
buh
bah
. Iambic quadrameter, and he makes it
so
dreary. Love. Ladies. Plenty of puerile keenness. He had
one
poem from his first collection that stood out. But he cut it. He was
conventional
.”

“What was the poem?” Andrew asked.

“ ‘To Mary
.
’ It was about a whore. Apparently he fell in love with her. He had a bad habit of doing that. A weakness for saving strumpets. What’s the line?
And smile to think how oft were done, What prudes declare a sin to act is
.” He sipped his drink. “
A sin to act is
. A mix of metrical anticlimax and a dirty joke.
That
is the author of
Don Juan
. Laughing at himself for loving. That’s mature. Sorry, chaps, but it is. And he cut it.” Fawkes wrinkled his nose. “If he’d died at twenty, no one would know Lord Byron from a hundred other minor nobodies.”

“So what happened? How did he improve?” prompted Andrew. He was sipping his drink freely now. In a haze of Fawkes’s cigarette smoke, mind buzzing with the alcohol, Andrew started to feel at ease for the first time since he had arrived. If he had paused to think about it, he would have realized he was feeling more at home than he had at home. But for now, he was merely aware of an excitement welling in his chest.

“Good question,” said Fawkes, jabbing in Andrew’s direction with his cigarette. “People search for the mystery of Shakespeare—how a middle-class nobody from Stratford could write great plays. Byron’s story is much more unlikely. At age twenty, he’s writing namby-pamby verses. Then, for some reason . . . he flees England. No one knows precisely why.
I will never live in England if I can avoid it. Why—must remain a secret.
He takes a long sea voyage. Then a few months later—on Halloween night, in Epirus, Greece—he starts a poem. In Spenserian stanza of all things. Which is suddenly . . . a masterpiece. Epic. Rich. Mature. It invents, whole cloth,
the Byronic
. The young man, brooding and fated, bearing a burden of unspeakable sins. He’s famous, overnight. A genius,” Fawkes said, dubiously, “overnight.”

Andrew and Persephone exchanged a glance. “Is that a bad thing?” asked Andrew.

“It’s not bad. But it’s impossible!” Fawkes ranted. “You’re either a prodigy with talent, or you earn that talent with long hard work. You don’t grow wings in a few months. Poets,” he declared, “aren’t caterpillars.”

Having spent himself, and finished his cigarette, Fawkes rose and fetched a fresh pack, tapping it into his palm. Persephone slumped, looking bereft. The burden of the conversation was now on Andrew. He seized it eagerly. He felt like he hadn’t spoken for days. “Were
you
a prodigy?” he asked.

“I?” said Fawkes, taken aback.

“Yeah.”

“Piers won the Whitestone Prize at age twenty-nine,” offered Persephone. “He was the enfant terrible of English poetry.”

“Notice the past tense.”

“Are you still famous?”

“If you have to ask,” said Fawkes sourly, “then there’s your answer.”

“So what’s slowing you down?”

Fawkes cocked an eye at Andrew. “I can’t write about who Byron loved, or what he cared about, when I don’t even know who he is. I can’t write a play about a caterpillar.” Fawkes ripped off the cigarettes’ cellophane wrapper with a vengeance.

“Sorry. I offended you,” said Andrew.

“And what do you know about Byron?” Fawkes demanded.

“Me? Ah, nothing.”

“Ever read any?”

“Nope.”

“I suppose you read nothing but Walt Whitman, in America?” said Persephone.

“Robert Frost in anthologies,” countered Andrew.

Fawkes scrabbled around in the desk for another hardcover. He flipped through it quickly, cigarette jabbing from his lips and threatening to ignite the page, then thrust the volume at Andrew.

“Read that,” Fawkes said. He pointed at a poem. “Out loud.”

Andrew was taken aback. “What, now?”

For an answer, Fawkes flopped himself onto the sofa alongside Persephone, watching Andrew expectantly.

“Of course now. You came here to audition, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but it seems like you’re mad.”

“Mad, in the American sense. Mad, as in angry. Yes, I am angry. I have been angry since I was fourteen. It’s been my trademark. I write many poems about it. But I am not mad at
you
. I want to hear you read this poem. It may well be the highlight of a truly abominable day. And you’re the one, by the by, who needs to be mad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know!” Fawkes and Persephone said the last part together, and laughed. Then they sat and waited.

“Um,” Andrew began.

He attempted to read sitting on the sofa, but Persephone forced him to stand. Then she moved him to the center of the room, and he stood there, holding the volume like a first grader about to recite a poem at assembly. Andrew felt ridiculous.

The book—
Selected Poetry of Lord Byron
—had a green cover and a dollar-bin smell. He scanned the lines. This was not romantic stuff, trees and mountains and wispy epiphanies. It was something else. He looked up. The same two faces: Fawkes pulling alternately on his Silk Cut and his martini, Persephone’s jaded expression gone, a kind of openness in its place.

So he began.

“I had a dream,” he pronounced.

The two audience members sniggered. Andrew reddened.

“Just read normally,” Fawkes said. “In your normal voice.”

Andrew swallowed. “I had a dream,” he resumed, “which was not all a dream . . .”

The poem began, sonorous, authoritative, vivid, like the words of a correspondent from a war zone.

. . . The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

Did wander darkling in eternal space,

Rayless and pathless, and the icy Earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.

The poem—the first he had read of its kind: a horror poem, he decided—built, line by line, into an evolving and meaningless tragedy where regular people were stripped of their humanity and were reduced to their animal selves. It was a description, seemingly firsthand, of the world’s demise; a devolution from a grassy, fruitful habitat to a stark, stony rock; a shocking and sudden reversal, from life as history and biography to life as astronomy—volcanoes and darkness and grubbing for food and survival.
No Love was left
, he read. And by the time he came to the end—
the waves were dead
—he felt himself swaying, hypnotized by the rhythm—
the winds were withered in the stagnant air
—dizzy from never taking a breath and stricken by the violence of the poem. He raised his eyes, surprised, almost, to see the dimly lit apartment, and not the waste land of the poem.
Darkness had no need of them
it concluded, and he pronounced the final words, without quite meaning to, while gazing into Persephone’s eyes:

“. . . She was the Universe.”

Persephone’s face had gone flaccid. Fawkes smoked, an ash stem hanging from his cigarette. Had he bombed? Gone too fast? Been unintelligible? He had slurred once or twice—he was used to beer in cans, not straight liquor—and cursed himself for accepting the drink. Anger and embarrassment choked him.

FAWKES KNEW HE
would stew later over being called a has-been by a brat. The anger coming not so much from the boy’s impertinence (which in principle Fawkes valued) but from the fact that he himself was so transparent. That a teenager could, literally, walk in off the street, and after hearing a few unguarded comments, dissect him with ease. Mediocre. Stuck. All true. And not writing—or writing well—plagued him worse than failing at his job.
Fuck Jute,
he thought for the eleventh time that day, but differently this time, a dismissive
fuck off,
not an angry one—Jute was nothing compared to writer’s block. Producing thin stuff and knowing it’s thin stuff and not being able to will yourself to quality. Poetry for Fawkes had always been his private treasure room, the secret hoard at the center of the castle, where you sought and sought and finally found the bullion, the pure metal of indivisible value: the ringing, absolute, true-pitched capture of some shred of experience, so right, so dead-on—a bit of dialogue, a comparison, an image—that it almost reminded you of death, the way a sentimental snapshot does: freezing time, to make you notice how relentlessly it passes. But the Byron play—flailing. Until now. Until seeing Andrew. It was almost cheating. Somebody loading the DVD of the Byron documentary, allowing Fawkes to watch the real man (boy) being followed around Harrow by a shaky videocam. Fawkes listened—
their feeble breath blew for a little life and made a flame
—and felt himself treading the steps of the castle—cold, uncertain, but holding his breath. He was sure now, with this curious sulky American before him, that he saw that golden glow under a door; he was certain he’d found the treasure room.

A moment passed, a long one. Andrew stood there, blushing.

Fawkes returned to the moment. He had not been paying much attention. But it was a good sign, probably, that the boy’s reading had sent him down that lane of—what? daydreaming?
What the hell; why not
, he thought.

“Can you limp?” he asked. The two students looked at him, puzzled. “Byron had a clubfoot,” he explained. “If you can limp, you’ve got the part.”

They laughed. Andrew hammed a stage gimp around the apartment.

“All right, all right. You’re not playing a pirate. You’ve got the part of George Gordon Byron, the sixth Lord Byron, author of
Childe Harold
,
Don Juan
, and many broken marriages. Who surely, at sometime, somewhere, fell in love with someone that he never forgot.”

5

The Claw-Footed Tub

“DO YOU KNOW
what’s wrong with this place?”

“No, Roddy, tell us.”

Andrew had the feeling that this was a practiced routine. Gather in a room when the homework had become overbearing. Snack. Waste valuable hours getting Roddy wound up. Then snicker at him.

Rhys, the head of house, reclined on his bed, a biology diagram untended on his lap. Roddy had stopped by to borrow some jam. Henry had poked his head in. Andrew had wandered by. Oliver had heard their voices. Before Rhys could stop them, they had arrayed themselves on his furniture, a party in white shirts and black ties.

“Where do you begin . . . that it exists at all?” said Henry.

Andrew forced a smile. Henry’s humor seemed stuck in sixth grade. He had watery, uncertain eyes and the twitchy manner of a mouse in a snake house.

“Nobody laughs,” Roddy declared. “When I was younger, we used to laugh, really laugh. My friends and I, we used to
piss
ourselves laughing.”

He guffawed just with the memory of it. Rhys, Oliver, and Henry passed around their accustomed glances. Rhys grinned.
Here he goes
.

“Over the stupidest things,” Roddy continued. “Over nothing! My mates and I used to make up songs. Completely wet. We made fun of the staff. You think our Matron is fat.
This
Matron was.” He made a balloon face. His audience chuckled. “I mean, a fucking planet, man. And the women who cleaned were foreign and they
reeked
. How can you
clean
and smell like that? I mean they smelled worse than the toilets they were cleaning! You find the bathroom dirty and you leave it stinking? I don’t know what they were, those cleaning women. Romanian? Filthy gypsies. The immigration in this country . . .”

“Fo-cus,” called Rhys.

“You were saying how you used to laugh,” Andrew prompted.

“Right. Right,” said Roddy. “We used to piss ourselves laughing. And then I came here. That was one of the first things I noticed about this place.”

“The scholarly seriousness of it,” offered Oliver.

“The academic gravitas,” Rhys expounded.

“Oh yeah, this place is really serious,” echoed Henry limply.

“
Nobody laughs
,” Roddy blustered. “Not like that. Not like we did. Just laughing to laugh. Weeping with laughter. I came here and I just stopped.” Roddy paused. He disappeared into memory. The other boys watched him. Suddenly Andrew pictured a shorter, rotund Roddy, forlorn and picked on savagely by older kids, misguidedly looking to this crew for sanctuary—Rhys, Henry, Oliver; a grab bag; a strange lot. “This place,” Roddy intoned at last, “took my laughter from me.”

They paused; then dissolved in derision.

“Get out.”

“What a loser.”

“Git.” Someone threw a pencil at him.

“That’s it, everybody out. I have work to do,” announced Rhys.

They spilled out of the room and into the hall.

“Andrew, I’d like a word,” Roddy said.

Roddy’s room displayed his few but serious passions: a black gym bag for racquets (an obscure sport Andrew had never heard of—something between tennis and squash, he guessed), comic books, and a hiding place for food. As Andrew hovered, Roddy produced a loaf of bread in a plastic bag.

“Pay attention,” he commanded. He put his lips to the bag—
vwwwwp
—and sucked the air out, then set the bag spinning and choked the neck closed with a twist. He looked at Andrew in triumph. “My technique. Keeps the bread fresh for five days.”

“That’s . . . that’s what you wanted to talk about?”

“I heard you’re in the play with Fawkes.”

There was something accusatory in his tone. “Yeah.”

“Don’t line yourself up with Fawkes, man. You’ve already got a reputation.”

“As what?”

“As a drug dealer, for one. Now people are saying you’ve cracked. After finding Theo. I take your side, though. I say, ‘Andrew is odd. No doubt about that. I mean, he is
fuck-ing
weird,’ ” Roddy guffawed, “ ‘but he’s no druggie. And he’s no more cracked than I am.’ Well. Quite a bit more, in fact. . . .”

“Thanks, Roddy.”

“But if you start up with Fawkes, who is the most despised man on the Hill . . . even I don’t know if I can help you.”

“Wait, why is he the most despised man on the Hill?”

“Don’t tell me you
like
Fawkes?” Roddy choked at the absurdity of it.

“He’s smart,” Andrew said defensively. “He’s a cultured guy.”

“He’s a pornographer. Have you read his so-called poetry?”

“No,” Andrew admitted.

“Neither have I. I can’t stand poetry,” said Roddy, aside, before resuming his harangue. “Fawkes does not understand the school
at all
. He gave a
skew
to Henkes, in the
lower Sixth
.” He waited for this to sink in. Andrew blinked. “A skew? To a sixteen-year-old? It isn’t done,” he continued. “Also, I was on the long ducker team last year and we trained for weeks.
Weeks
. Every housemaster was there, cheering for their house. Fawkes was nowhere to be seen. Off God knows where, drunk. It was crushing! Not to me, of course, but I thought some of the Removes were going to burst into tears. He just doesn’t get it, man. He’s off. Way, way off.”

“Hm.”

“I’m trying to save you, Andrew, before it’s too late. I’m trying to show you how to be normal.”

Roddy was still holding his spun-and-sucked loaf of bread. Andrew smiled.

“Got it. Thanks.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

ANDREW STARED AT
his sloping ceiling. It was like the cozy attic room you wanted when you’re a kid. Each night the orange streetlight filtered through the leaves of the plane tree and pressed a checkered map on the walls. Tonight the rain had momentarily relented and a breath of warm air had swept over the Hill, and the Lot boys were throwing a ball in the yard in an improvised game under the floodlights and lanterns. They roared lustily, cheered for points, and hollered
Oi
at fouls. The corridors below echoed with hallway chatter; TV noise; fag calls (decades after fagging had been nominally eliminated, the practice remained; Vaz standing outside the common room booming
Boy boy boy!
sending some tiny Shell on a mission to fetch him crisps and a beer from his cupboard). Andrew lay on his back. He thought about Persephone Vine.

A high-pitched shriek cut through the other noise. Andrew sat up and listened. There were plenty of people between him and whatever poor Remove was being tormented on a lower floor. But the scream came again. He rose from his bed. The ball game in the yard had been abandoned. The TV noise had stopped. He felt a sudden anxiety, and with it a suspicion that his reality had been jolted in an unpleasant way.

No, he was just being jumpy. He’d been traumatized. He would ignore the cry. Let someone else deal with it.

The cry came again. Desperate.

Andrew went into the hallway and called out, “Guys?”

No answer. But then a boy’s voice came hurtling up the stairwell.

Oh God stop it!

Andrew took a tentative step down the hall, but stopped himself: wasn’t somebody, anybody, nearby to help? The shriek came again—no words, just anguish—and Andrew plunged down the stairs, two at a time.

The ground floor lay quiet. Maybe everyone had already scrambled to the scene of this emergency, whatever it was?

He heard voices. They came from the basement. He descended the stone staircase to the bottom floor of the Lot.

The lights down here had been extinguished. He stood uncertainly in the corridor. When his eyes adjusted, he saw a weak glow through the opening that led to the showers. He entered the long shower room. Once inside, a shadow caught his eye. Just a flicker in the corner. Then another. A scampering, skittering noise on the tiles.
Rats
. They flitted in the shadows. A whole family, a dozen of them. Andrew raised his hand to his mouth, suppressing a retch.

“Get his trousers off,” came a commanding voice.

Andrew followed it. It came from the prefect’s bath, to his right. The glow came from there, too. And as he came alongside the open entryway, he saw the source of the screaming.

There, around the tub with its claw feet and chipped paint, three older boys surrounded a younger one. Andrew did not recognize any of them. But he knew hazing when he saw it. The younger kid reclined on the metal tub’s shallow dais as if he’d been thrown there, clinging to the tub’s rim. His white shirt had been torn down the front, and his hair and shirt clung to him, soaked. His face and chest were red, welted, from struggle. The three larger boys, standing, wore bathrobes. They carried towels. The light was very dim, as if some bulbs were not working.

“Get away!” screamed the younger boy. His voice was high and sharp. The voice Andrew had heard.

Two of the larger boys—not the speaker—grabbed the boy’s ankles and tugged. The kid slipped, head hitting hard against the wet tile. A sickening
clonk
.

Andrew woke from the voyeuristic stupor he’d fallen into.

“What are you
doing
?” he yelled.

He charged them. One of boys whirled and moved to meet him.

“Who do you think you are?” the boy growled. Without warning he sank a fist into Andrew’s gut and shoved Andrew to the ground. Andrew took the full brunt of the punch. Gasping for air like a fish on a dock, he was forced to watch the rest of the hazing ritual.

The two assailants tore off the boy’s wet trousers. One of them pointed off into the corner of the room. A rat, about the size of a small, furry sneaker, had emerged sniffing from the corner.

“Come on! Pss pss pss,” hissed one of them, squatting down and holding out his fingers over the boy’s crotch, as if offering food. “Have a tiny little prick for your tea.”

They cackled. The smaller boy writhed.

Meanwhile the third boy dropped his robe. He wore a towel underneath, thin, white, and wet, tightly wound around his buttocks. This, too, he peeled off. Now Andrew and the others could see the third boy’s penis—heavy, floppy, uncircumcised, and beginning to rise in an erection.

The two companions held the smaller boy to the floor. One of them reached down, grabbed his underpants in a fist, and ripped them off in two violent tugs. The boy screamed again, and thrashed, but the older kid, standing over him now, stroked himself, his erection growing.

“Hold him down,” he commanded. Then, breathing heavily, he advanced toward the bath. “All right, bitch.”

Andrew struggled to his feet. He couldn’t let this happen. He got what traction he could on the smooth floor and put his momentum into a punch. It caught the would-be rapist in the kidney, who cried out and fell. The other two boys jumped at Andrew. One gave Andrew such a shove he went down again on the wet floor. Now he was on his back, with two assailants upon him. The second boy came at him, ready to wrestle. But Andrew had an advantage. He still had shoes on—his heavy wingtips. Andrew kicked the kid in the face and drew blood on his cheek. The boy retreated.

Only the third remained. He looked the toughest—he had spiky hair and a confident way of squatting, hands out, ready for him. They engaged. The boy came in quick. He gripped the back of Andrew’s head, taking a fistful of hair. Andrew bellowed. Then he found Andrew’s ankle and pulled, and Andrew flipped, falling hard on his back—
again
. He groaned. The boy straddled his chest, reared back his fist, and swung. Andrew moved his head in time so the punch caught his ear. Then the attack ebbed. Andrew quickly scooted himself backward and looked up to see the smaller kid—the victim, nearly buck naked now, the shreds of his shirt dangling from his shoulders—strangling his opponent. He was using the largest boy’s abandoned robe-tie as a garrote. The wrestler gripped at his throat and gurgled.

“Stop,” commanded Andrew. “I’m okay. Stop it!”

The smaller boy’s expression was one of fury. He did not relent.

“For fuck’s sake, dude,
stop it
!”

Andrew reached forward and pried the boy’s fingers from the robe-tie. The redheaded attacker fell to the floor, hacking and wheezing. The smaller boy kept coming, but Andrew pushed him back.

“Take it easy!”

The boy’s face was twisted in frustration, anger, fury. But there was something else. Andrew stopped. All at once, he felt a deep, subterranean fear, like a hum or the tremble of an oncoming train.

“You’re okay now,” Andrew assured him. “It’s cool.”

The boy turned to Andrew and they locked eyes. Andrew felt a thrill pass down his spine. The boy’s hair had at first appeared dark because it was wet. Now strands of it had been shaken loose by fighting. It was longer and lighter than it had first appeared—almost albino white. The eyes were a vivid blue.

Andrew’s mind churned, seeking some connection it could not quite make.

The boy—tattered, soaked—turned to him with an obsequious smile, as warm and inviting as his rage had been frightening.

“You saved me,” he said. His voice trembled in a rich, prepubescent countertenor.

Andrew backed away. “Who are you?”

“I will not forget this,” he said, coming closer, his eyes never leaving Andrew’s.

Andrew kept taking steps backward.
Don’t let him touch you
, he told himself.
Don’t take your eyes off him
.
Don’t let him get close
.

The boy, inexplicably, began peeling off his shirt—what was left of it; his trousers were long gone. The boy’s chest was smooth, his stomach curved, his pubic hair blond and scarcely visible; he glowed in the light, warm from fear and exertion.

“They wished to rape me,” he said. “But I will let you.”

Andrew gaped. The meaning of the words struck him. An erotic charge crackled in the air.
The pure submission of it
. The boy advanced, his legs bare, smooth, and feminine, his shirt hanging in shreds. The boy pulled the remnants of his shirt apart, offering himself. Andrew took another involuntary step back.