Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  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 fif
teen-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.’

  ‘That’s my problem,’ Jim said. ‘I need you to tell me what licence I have to recreate Heliogabalus in contemporary terms. What matters to me is making him live now. My sources are too sketchy for me to lean on historical fact.’

  ‘I’ve no objection to your partially inventing history,’ Martin replied. ‘I’m all for students being original. What I don’t want is a purely psychological thesis. One that uses Heliogabalus as the baseline for a case history.’

  ‘Part of my work will, of course, be gender-based,’ Jim said. ‘There seems little doubt that his enemies were provoked by the fact that he was so openly gay.’

  Martin laughed. ‘No objections. If we’re to believe Lampridius, then Heliogabalus was the first – probably the only – Roman emperor openly to discuss the possibilty having a sex-change. This opens up a fascinating area of study that I hope you’ll explore. I think you’ll find Nero had similar tendencies, or at least he transferred them to his male lovers.’

  ‘Yes, to Sporus, wasn’t it? I’m glad you see this as a rich area of research. Although I think I’m right in saying there’s a pathology attached to Nero, which is not the case with Heliogabalus.’

  ‘I think so, most certainly,’ Martin replied. ‘Nero turned by degrees into a psychopath, committing one crime to cover for another. There’s certainly no evidence that Heliogabalus shared this tendency. But I’m still curious as to why you should choose such an obscure emperor as the subject for your dissertation.’

  ‘Empathy,’ Jim laughed. ‘But also the desire to rehabilitate him to history. He’s in many ways the emperor who has gone missing. It’s like he’s been sucked into a hole in the middle of the galaxy.’

  ‘There’s also the question of ritual,’ Martin added. ‘What for instance did his cult worship, other than the sun? Nobody’s ever made it clear, at least not in the way that we know about constituents of Mithraism or the rites conducted as part of the Elysian mysteries. I’d like you to tell me something about the cult of Elagabal. Allusions to it are few, but it shouldn’t be too hard to reconstruct.’

  ‘What we do know’, Jim said, feeling his assertiveness return, ‘is that he sacrificed animals in his temple and also underwent the taurobolium. There’s also an allusion to him having celebrated the rites of Salambo and if I recall correctly a reference somewhere to him throwing animals off a high tower as part of some ritual.’

  ‘Good,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sure if you follow your sources you’ll hit on the right trail. It’s an area in which I’m particularly interested. And what about his three marriages? They were surely organized around motives of religion –’

  ‘Perhaps, but there were other reasons. I think his first marriage to Julia Paula was undoubtedly dominated by the feeling he should marry into the Roman aristocracy. It seems to have been an attempt on his part to infiltrate the patrician classes.’

  ‘You mean because he himself was a foreigner?’

  ‘Precisely. He had no kudos in Rome other than a tenuous claim to be an Antonine.’

  ‘But his second marriage, though, to the Vestal Aquilia Severa, was undoubtedly an attempt to superimpose his own god on Rome’s existing one,’ Martin said.

  ‘Without question. Although his perversity was such that the idea of violating an off-limits woman was probably an additional incentive.’

  ‘I see you’ve got his psychology well sewn up,’ Martin approved. ‘And the third marriage? The motives behind this have always seemed obscure to me.’

  ‘Anna Faustina was, of course, an aristocrat. She was the great-granddaughter of the emperor Marcus Aurelius through his fourth daughter Arria Fadilla. We know little about her, although she seems to have been implicated in a plot involving two senators aimed at deposing the emperor. That she wasn’t executed again points to Heliogabalus’ benign nature.’

  ‘Weren’t all these women middle-aged if I remember correctly? And none of them particularly attractive?’

  ‘So we’re led to believe. They all seem to have been in their mid-forties and long past the age of producing an heir. I imagine they were a cover for his sexuality
.’

  ‘It would seem so,’ Martin said. ‘It’s hard to get away from gender when considering Heliogabalus. He was clearly looking to marry mother figures, I suppose.’

  ‘A not unreasonable conclusion,’ Jim said, with inflected irony. He could sense that he had more than held his own and displayed his knowledge to reasonable effect. He judged from Martin’s tone they were nearing an end to the meeting, something enforced by his supervisor’s habit of studying his snakeskin loafers as a preliminary to winding down.

  ‘I’d like to see some more work from you in about eight weeks,’ Martin said. ‘Perhaps with some of the ideas we’ve discussed today incorporated into the thesis. It’s shaping up well.’

  When Martin stood up Jim felt relieved he had acquitted himself commendably. The feelings were almost compensatory, given the bad things that had happened earlier. He walked out of the room feeling elated, the hole in his nerves momentarily stitched, as he briefly forgot Danny and his invidious threat.

  As a reward Jim decided to go and do some reading in a little café in Monmouth Street.

  The staff never bothered him there and left him free to work at his table for as long as he wished. He was still reading the Penguin edition of The Lives of the Later Caesars and using the book as an overview on the often mad, depraved and perversely inhuman personalities who ruled over the declining empire. In most cases their pathologies were inseparable from their actions, and he found himself fascinated by the belief common amongst them that they were gods. The drive towards self-divinization, a recognition conferred on the emperor by the Senate, was at the roots of the megalomania so often displayed by the tyrannical individuals written up in the Augustan History. Although Jim didn’t see madness as belonging to a hereditary genotype, he was none the less fascinated by the irregularities of behaviour attributed not only to the later caesars but also to their prototypes such as Caligula and Nero.