by Jeremy Reed
They were almost there when he saw the man leap the barrier blade in hand. Instinct had him throw himself to the right as the man was brutally cut down by a guard. Again, he didn’t falter, as the man’s dead body was booted back under the barrier in an act of merciless efficiency. The killing-machine had stepped in to save him but couldn’t take away any of the shock of attempted homicide.
The music continued to push him on like current feeding his energies. There was no give in the tension. He was gasping from shock and the elemental rawness of the storm, but they were almost there. The rain was so hard that Rome seemed to have dissolved like confectionery in front of his eyes. What he couldn’t erase, though, was the image of the blade pointed directly at him, the man’s hair matted by rain and his body punching the air before the guard struck.
When they got to the temple, he relaxed in the shared spirit of the group. If the music had encouraged the incident of his near assassination, then he was unrepentant. There were no boundaries to his dance, and if there were he had exceeded them all.
He embraced the dark interior like skin. The priests had been chanting all day and the vibration was a solid hum. The crowds, the storm, Rome’s incessantly morphing perspectives, they were all shut out by the temple’s voluminous interior. Here his true life began, the one in which he connected to a source so powerful that if he was to attempt to contain it he knew he would be burned alive.
He took his place before the fire at the altar. The power was in him now, and he felt its energy climb his spinal column like a snake. He was himself again, as he had been as a child in the temple at Emesa. The chant massaged the altered state he was experiencing. The attendants were preparing to offer sacrifice. It was his moment. He waited in the dark for his cue, while the thunder broke overhead, then went forward, trembling, expectant and surfing the music’s unbreakable beat.
6
When Jim let himself into Masako’s building, he was still unnerved from his close encounter with Slut. The man’s image kept showing up on repeat, and walking back he had found himself periodically turning around to see if he was being followed.
He found Masako studying a book of Helmut Newton’s, her attention focused on a photo of a nude woman in tomato-red stilettos lying on fallen leaves in a park. When he joined her in looking at the photo he could see the partially obscured, dark-suited man’s hand on the model’s left buttock and the way her head was supported by the white cuff of his other arm. The two were interlocked in front of the wheels of a parked Citroen carrying the registration plate 8461 DK 92. To Jim the shot seemed extraordinary for its juxtaposition of the woman’s audacious shoes with the car’s black ultra-glossy panelling. One was translated into the other in the symbiotic union of flesh and metal and in a way that dissolved the barriers between human and commodity.
Jim looked at the cold marriage of opposites so brilliandy realized in the photograph and at the shadow thrown on the page by Masako’s spiky fringe. He crouched down beside her as she turned the pages for them both. Newton’s celebration of nudes in spike heels and fetish wear or designer-dressed on the streets of Paris, Berlin and New York came up as a genre obsessed with glamour and its self-regarding importance to the wearer. That the models combined an archetypal curviness with the stern character traits of a dominatrix made them in Jim’s eyes appear sexless.
Masako spent a long time looking at a model with her right leg in plaster standing beneath a huge rain-dropped chandelier in a hotel room. For some reason the image fascinated her and she was reluctant to let it go.
They breezed through endless Vogue shots of girls wearing leopard-skin, black silk stockings, face-nets, stylized hats and the trademark Newton red lipstick and high heels. As glamour statements transformed into figurative art, the photographs were unparalleled documents of obsessively observed fetishism. Jim thought of them as one man’s continuous attempt to reshape the world according to a visual aesthetic.
‘You hungry?’ Masako asked, breaking the spell imposed by the book. She was wearing a black lipstick in contrast to her pale features.
Jim hadn’t eaten since the morning and only now became aware of the fact he was really hungry.
‘I’m starving,’ he said, feeling the roll of his stomach juices. ‘I haven’t eaten all day, and guess what? I almost bumped into Slut in Monmouth Street. He didn’t see me, thankfully. He was coming out of Neal’s Yard, bare feet in the rain. He’s a real weirdo.’
‘You mean you’ve seen him again?’ Masako said quietly, trying to stay calm.
‘It’s almost like I’ve been hexed,’ Jim replied, his laughter failing to suppress a deeper note of anxiety.
‘Mmm, it’s odd. You talk to me while I start cooking. There’s some wine out if you’d like to open the bottle.’
Feeling the need for a drink, Jim poured out two glasses and felt the Bordeaux nettle his tongue before catching on his empty stomach. He liked the light-headed rocky feeling of the sugar kicking in and the immediate relaxant it proved. His nerves were bad, and he quickly poured a second glass.
Masako was busy chopping vegetables for a stir-fry, her glass still untouched, and when she finally returned and took a sip it was with a delicacy that savoured the tang before swallowing. Her lip-signature left a black tattoo on the glass, and Jim found himself preoccupied by the detail to the exclusion of all else.
He went and stood at the entrance to the tiny kitchen while she chopped mushrooms and peppers, adding tofu to the bean-sprouts and noodles in the pan. He knew all about Masako’s strict vegetarianism and how she had never been won over to the junk-food regime of her Japanese friends in London. Like him, she was conscious of what she ate, and was highly selective about what she put into her body.
He found himself drinking fast and getting off on the effect. He was on his third glass and knew he would have to go out for a second bottle but for the moment preferred to stay talking to Masako.
‘Everything all right with your tutor, Jim?’ she asked.
‘Yes, fine,’ he laughed. ‘He’s endorsed quite a few of the unorthodox approaches I intend to bring to my subject. Heliogabalus is bizarre even in the world of crazy emperors. You’re probably tired of my telling stories about him.’
‘No, go on,’ Masako said, the black T-bar of her G-string showing above her jeans as she bent to retrieve a runaway onion.
‘Today, I’m sure he would have hair like yours,’ he said, inflecting the compliment with humour. ‘What can I tell you that I haven’t already?That he was a drama queen, that he liked to surround himself with Chaldean magicians, that he ordered a pyramid of snow to be constructed in his orchard in July, that he had the villas in which he stayed torched on leaving, that he insisted on depilating his genitals and that he got married on five occasions – three of them to women and two to men.’
‘Mmm. Makes Japanese pop stars seem very ordinary.’
‘The reason he’s survived is, of course, because he was so extraordinary,’ Jim said, powering up to his theme. ‘He’s still so relevant today. I suppose in part it’s the sexual ambiguity surrounding his name that’s helped. He’s the ideal subject for the politics of gender. Nothing fascinates people more than dubious sexuality.’
‘Mmm, you’re right,’ Masako said, tooling a mosaic of chopped vegetables into the wok.
‘I suppose his intentions were to undermine the whole principles on which empires are built, and that gives him the appeal of a rebel. He even outspent Nero and managed to get rid of the equivalent today of about four hundred million in three years.’
‘That’s good going,’ Masako said, adding soy sauce to the packed ingredients.
‘Well, he certainly needed it to organize his lifestyle,’ Jim replied. ‘He would arrange dinners at which ten thousand mice were served, or ten thousand weasels, and in which fish had been expressly brought frozen from Egypt, Africa or the Adriatic. He was also a zoolatrist and accumulated snakes, crocodiles, rhinoceros and hippopotami for his own amusement. His
pet lions were let loose in the palace.’
‘Leopards, too, I suppose,’ Masako said, as she continued to apply sauce like graffiti.
‘They were a favourite with all the later emperors. While you’re cooking, I think I’ll go out and get us another bottle of wine. I’ve almost killed this one off.’
‘Wine’s a good relaxant,’ Masako said. ‘But don’t be long. The food’ll be ready soon. You need to eat.’
Jim hurried downstairs and out into the night air. It was almost dark, and Frith Street was coming alive with Sohoites. There was a spill of people sitting outside Bar Italia, as well as the cappuccino bar on the corner next to Jimmy’s.
Although he could have picked up the wine in Old Compton Street, he decided to match it by going to Nicolas in Berwick Street. Lit up by the drink, he was more confident than ever that he had his dissertation on the right track and looked forward to supplying Masako with more colourful details about Heliogabalus on his return. There was so much to relate, and he welcomed the security that staying with her for a number of days would bring.
Old Compton Street was packed with clones on both sides of the street. It was the usual jostling, hustling crowd, interspersed with the inquisitive and the curious. He had used most of the gay bars in the precinct and felt perfectly at home in the sympathetic milieu.
He walked the short distance up to Dean Street. There was a rainy aftershine to the neighbourhood, and he could see lumbering white clouds going over in the dark-blue sky. It hadn’t occurred to him that at Masako’s he was only minutes away from St Anne’s Court, and he tried to block the thought out of his mind. The reminder pushed buttons, and for a moment he almost turned back.
Zapping his momentary indecisiveness, he turned left into Meard Street, its smart Queen Anne houses facelifted and repointed after decades of having been run down and used as brothels. Long before the media and the shirtmaker John Pearse had moved in Jim remembered the street as an unlit alley in which girls materialized out of the dark.
Sanitized under Thatcher as desirable conversions, the properties now stood disinherited from their underworld connections. The street was empty, and there were sloshy puddles underfoot as he decided to cut through to Wardour Street. He walked quickly and was almost through when he noticed someone standing with his back to the wall on the corner. There was a black car parked up in a strictly no-parking zone, but he didn’t give it much attention. He didn’t like the vibe of the character waiting there. It was only a feeling, but he was tempted to turn back, as much as he resented living in fear of his shadow. This person could have been waiting for anyone, and he tried not to be concerned.
He kept on his way determined not to make eye contact with the man. He was almost through to the other side when the man came at him from behind. He felt his arms pinioned and the bite of metal locking on to one wrist and then the other. He thought it must be a case of mistaken identity and that he was being wrongly arrested. He was waiting for the words ‘You’re under arrest’ but instead found himself being speedily bundled into a car door opened from the inside. His appeals for help were silenced by a hand placed over his mouth. The driver took off at high speed, flooring the accelerator in the direction of Oxford Street. Jim felt himself projected into a parallel universe, and his first thought was how panicked Masako would be at his disappearance. As the hand was removed from his mouth he recognized the two men he was sandwiched between as members of Slut’s cult. One of them had accosted him earlier in the day in Charlotte Street and the other he remembered by the indigo-coloured bat tattooed on his neck and the severity of a pierced, angular chin.
He thought again, as the car tailored itself to traffic and negotiated an erratic course to the lights, of how anxious Masako would be growing. She would doubtless be listening for the click of his key in the lock, impatient for his return.
Jim had no idea where they were headed, and attempts to ask met with no reply. The driver skewed the car into Tottenham Court Road, tucking in behind a red bus before overtaking on the straight. Clearly not wishing to draw attention to himself, he drove within limits and without the reckless flourishes characteristic of a getaway car. He followed up and went all the way through on the Hamp-stead Road towards Camden. It was fully dark now, and a shower opened up tinnily on the roof with a popcorn crackle.
Jim could do nothing and felt it better to offer no resistance. One of the men advised the driver to keep straight on as he killed the car at the lights. Jim had a hunch that they were heading for Hampstead Heath and, given the cult’s association with the place, he wondered if he was being taken there to witness their nocturnal rites. The rain came and went again in abrupt flurries. Jim was amazed they hadn’t searched him for his cell-phone, which remained secure in his inside pocket.
The road was clear all the way up to Mornington Crescent. He kept appealing that it was a case of mistaken identity, and would they please let him out of the car. Camden was busy with ordinary people going about their lives, and he looked out at an excerpted High Street with its speed-trap cameras and rebranded chains. Freedom had suddenly become the most valuable thing in the world to him, as he recognized how all of his life he had taken it for granted. He would have given anything to have had it back, as the driver handled the black Toyota effortlessly with a light touch of the wheel.
‘Follow the road all the way up,’ the man next to him instructed. ‘Keep going until I tell you to turn off.’
Jim once again insisted that they let him out, but his words met with a blank. That he had been abducted and was unlawfully being driven towards an unknown destination communicated barcodes of panic to his system. He had read about big city kidnaps but had never thought that he might experience one. He imagined Masako now growing frantic over his failure to return, and he clung to the idea that she would almost certainly notify the police. That someone knew he was missing was his one hope, as the car burned up the largely open road. That his kidnappers were gay made the situation additionally confusing, and he could only think that the whole thing had been engineered by Slut.
As the Toyota came up parallel with a number 168 bus at the Pond Street intersection, the man with the bat tattooed on his neck winked at him in a manner that seemed to say ‘It’s all right.’ Jim looked out at the free world and saw a blonde reading at the near-side window of the bus. There was no chance of him making eye contact with her, and anyhow he existed in a parallel universe.
They took off up Rosslyn Hill, past the police station on the corner of Downshire Hill and into a mini-tailback of red brake lights. The rain had given over and the moon trained a white spotlight on the city. Jim felt even more certain now that they were headed for the Heath with its busy nocturnal scene.
His suspicions were confirmed as the driver took the right-hand turn at the top of the High Street and accelerated up the hill towards the landmark of Jack Straw’s Castle, the pub’s imposing white facade pointing the entrance to the East Heath’s deep oak-woods.
They pulled up in the pub’s car-park, and Jim was told that he was to accompany the men on to the Heath. ‘We want you to meet someone,’ he was told by the man on his right. ‘We’ll take the hand-cuffs off here, but it’s not in your interest to try and escape.’
Jim felt instant relief as the constraining metal was removed from his wrists. He flexed a hand, aware as he did so of increased circulation. He followed the men out of the car and down a track that led to a dense cluster of trees. The moon had come clear with the quality of substitute daylight, giving to the immediate landscape the look of a reversed negative. As they struck down the track he could see a light glowing in the wood, as though posted there to signpost the way.
Jim could just make out figures going in and out of the trees and realized they were the undercover cult who occupied the woods after dark. He had never visited the place before at night and had heard of its legendary status only from those who got high on the dangers implicit in anonymous sex. His vulnerability would never have allowe
d him to come here in the dark and risk being compromised or even attacked.
As they drew nearer the wood he could see that the light came from what looked like a number of lamps placed on one particular tree. Somebody stepped out of the dark in front of them, looked in their direction and was instantly swallowed up by leaf cover. He could hear somebody else wading through bushes before the silence flooded back. The landscape appeared to be alive with fugitives dissolved into their places of concealment as black on black.
A froth of rainy foliage exploded in his face as they ducked in under overhanging branches. The man in front knew precisely where he was going as he led the way into an alcove where the trees formed a roof over a clearing. Jim could make out a circle of men grouped around the light, obviously convened there for some sort of ritual. They had lit a fire from branches, and a busy orange flame had started to draw, the smoke snuffling from wet undergrowth. He was certain he could see Danny in the group, a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes, his leather jacket twinkling with studs.
Jim stood there, still unable to believe that what he was seeing was real. He avoided looking at Danny and kept thinking that if he closed his eyes the whole thing would disappear.
‘This is Jim who was with us last night,’ the tattooed man said to the group. ‘He’s the one we thought needed to find out more.’
Jim was about to protest his innocence but decided against it, realizing he was up against the group. The faces concentrated around the light were ones he recognized from St Anne’s Court: the same shaved clones, metalled with studs and rings and singularly focused into a perverse phallocentric culture. The shadow they projected seemed more intense here and to be an extension of the surrounding night.
Jim was told to sit, and he took up his place by the blood-orange fire. He could hear rain tapping the leaves on the outside and pitting drops into the flames. A tall cross, fashioned out of branches, had been thrust into the burning, and he assumed this was part of the ritual. Some of the group were chanting a mantra, the low vocal grumble sounding like a bee was being passed from lip to lip. The vibration was contagiously hypnotic, and without knowing it he felt compelled to join in. Something was speaking through him and casting a spell.