On Loving Josiah

by Olivia Fane

‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Have you forgotten what day it is today?’

  ‘The 21st February,’ said Josiah, innocently.

  ‘Where have you been, Josiah?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  Josiah shrugged.

  ‘Please don’t look so impertinent. It’s not like you.’

  ‘What is like me, then?’

  ‘Eat something and get some overalls on. You knew today was the day.’

  ‘The place doesn’t need painting.’

  ‘You just come with me,’ Angela insisted, and took him by the arm into the dining-room. ‘Doesn’t this look so much better? So much brighter? Admit they’ve done a good job!’

  But Josiah just asked where the curtains were, and one of the ‘painting teams’ walked up to them and told them just what they thought of the matter. ‘It fucking took us three hours and we weren’t paid a fucking penny for it. It’s fucking exploitation. And where were you, mate?’

  Josiah’s old bullies had long gone, but this new batch stared at him menacingly, like they might just see to him later. But nowadays menace was water off a duck’s back; he was nearly fifteen and he didn’t give a damn. No one could touch him, no one in this place, anyway.

  That evening, though, he went up to Angela and apologized.

  He explained there was an old lady he’d met who lived just opposite the school, and he’d been helping her clean up her kitchen and move some furniture around. Angela’s face softened immediately, for though Josiah was by now a consummate liar the expression on his face rang true and she believed him.

  ‘Oh Josiah!’ Angela sighed happily. ‘You’re a good boy, you really are!’

  Angela gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder, which Josiah received with good grace.

  He looked up at her winsomely and said, ‘There’s a bit of paint left over. You know what would really thrill her? If I gave her kitchen a whitewash in the morning. Can I have your permission to do that, Angela?’

  Josiah was standing outside Thomas’ door at eight o’clock the following morning. As he’d been awake since four, planning his assault, the borrowed overalls, tin of Dulux paint and a couple of brushes waiting expectantly in his rucksack at the bottom of his bed, his setting out at seven forty-five seemed positively restrained. He even remembered to sign himself out in the book this time, though he paused under the column which asked him for a destination address/phone number, and wrote down the number of the house next door, where a nice old lady, he smiled to himself, happened to live.

  But at eight o’clock that morning Thomas was not expecting him; in fact, just as Josiah was waking at four and did not know what to do with himself, Thomas was finally falling asleep, after a night of anguish, yearning and guilt, a diet, known, I fear, by paedophiles throughout the land. And the man who actually opened the door to Josiah was not a sympathetic one, Greg the lodger no less, who was unhappily interrupted mid-yoghurt.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, aggressively looking him up and down, ‘What do you want?’ Greg was not a man to mince his words.

  ‘I’ve come to see Dr Thomas Marius,’ explained Josiah.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m his nephew.’

  ‘I never knew he had a nephew,’ said Greg, suspiciously.

  ‘If that fact interests you in any way, you might want to know he has three nephews, of which I am one, and two nieces, and three living grand-parents. And, if you’re interested in Thomas’ family connections, my great uncle Patrick died last year, but the others are in excellent health.’

  ‘A family of great longevity,’ remarked Greg, without budging.

  ‘Ah, I see you have your eye on my rucksack. Would you like to take a look inside it? No bomb, just a tin of white paint.’

  ‘Come into the kitchen, then. He’s asleep,’ said Greg grumpily, unwilling to be kept from his breakfast a moment longer.

  ‘Ah, so they’re your yoghurts!’ said Josiah, as he sat down beside him to watch.

  ‘So, you’ve had breakfast here before, then?’ asked Greg, down to his last spoonful now, and all ears.

  ‘I might have, what’s it to you?’

  Greg shrugged malevolently. ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Josiah, and he got up and walked upstairs.

  The orange pekoe walls disturbed him, and he instinctively went back to the hall to fetch his rucksack. Armed thus, he felt braver. He found the bathroom, and then Greg’s room, which was dirty and gloomy with deep purple walls and a large unmade bed which took up two thirds of it. The third door, then, would be Tom’s. He looked at his watch, eight fifteen. That wasn’t so early, he decided, even on a Sunday.

  Josiah crept in quietly. Josiah had never been into somebody else’s bedroom, and he saw immediately it was an intimate thing. Tom’s bed was no bigger than his own, though he took up a greater proportion of it. He was so fast asleep that his first thought was to go back to The Hollies and come back later, but he couldn’t resist walking a few paces closer to him. The window was wide open, though it was only February, and the room was cold; but the closer he got to Thomas’s bed the warmer he became. Thomas had a wardrobe in his room, old and stark and brown, and Josiah smiled when he realised Thomas’ chest of drawers was rather like his own, and the top drawer was open and filled with socks and old-fashioned y-front pants, which he’d always imagined was the prerogative of the over-sixties.

  His eyes were acclimatizing now to the dim light, and Josiah thought it would be interesting to kneel beside him and look very hard into his face. How finely made he was, he decided, like an aristocrat: a delicate nose and chin, unshaven but prettily shaped, though his dark hair seemed fraught and wild this morning, and Josiah could tell from the way his eyes were moving under his lids that he was still dreaming. He would have given anything to be sharing his dream right now and seeing what he was seeing. Then he held his hand an inch or two over Thomas’s mouth, the lines of which could have been drawn, so well made it was, and his breath felt humid and excited him. So then Josiah went further still, and leaned right over Thomas’ face so that his mouth was hovering over Thomas’, and he took Thomas’ breath and breathed it into his lungs, and it felt good and precious, as he tried to get the rhythm of it. And once he had mastered this, and felt its eroticism, he breathed his own breath into Thomas and willed, ‘Now, dream of me!’

  Still Thomas didn’t wake up, but suddenly he noticed that his mentor had gone to sleep with a book in his hand, which was now wedged against the wall. Well then, he thought, here was another way of entering Thomas’ head, perhaps this is what he was dreaming of after all. He managed to extract the book without waking him and sat down with it in the recess of the window so that he could see what it was about.

  The book itself was a handsome one, he thought; it smelt good and was bound in dark blue leather. Its title was Symposium which meant nothing to Josiah. The introduction set out its theme, namely that a number of speakers were asked to make a speech in praise of Eros, or erotic love, and when he read that Josiah turned towards the sleeping Tom and wondered at him reading it. The dialogue itself, of course, was written in Greek, and he couldn’t understand a word; but for twenty minutes at least Josiah’s imagination enjoyed what his linguistic skills could not.

  At last, Josiah was woken from his pleasant reverie by some strange noise of Thomas who had spotted him there. Josiah leapt up, book in hand, full of apology and explanation, and said he’d brought some paint with him to whitewash his walls, for hadn’t Tom said he didn’t like the orange and the green? Hadn’t he said that?

  Thomas lay very still on his bed and said quietly, ‘Josiah, you can’t do this, you know.’

  Josiah ignored him and went on, ‘I was reading your book. Who was Plato?’

  ‘Josiah, you need to go home. I’ll see you next Saturday as we planned. You can’t do this.’

  Josiah then knelt at Thomas�
��s bed, so their faces were less than a foot apart. He said, ‘I am so, so sorry.’

  Thomas looked up at the ceiling. He said coldly, ‘Go home, Josiah.’ And then he waited, as though frozen, while he listened to Josiah’s tentative steps on the stairs, and the opening and closing of the front door. ‘The fool!’ he said out loud.

  The following day, Thomas said ‘The fool!’ a second time, as he read a note in his locker left by the elderly but good-natured porter Mr Ron Herrod (who had known Thomas even as an undergraduate) saying that a lad who claimed to be his nephew had been looking for him that Saturday lunchtime. But if Thomas had been angry with him on both counts, the discovery of the tin of paint and two paintbrushes at the end of his bed that evening rather moved him, and he feared he had been too stern with the boy. By the Friday evening he had so softened that he had bought him a pain au chocolat as a way of making it up to him. What’s more, with a clearer conscience than at any time since he had first set eyes on the boy, he slept well, and happily welcomed him into his house at nine o’clock exactly, ready to resume their Latin lessons.

  Josiah’s restless energy had been used to master the whole of the first book of the Oxford Latin Course on his own. Thomas remarked on his prodigious memory and solid grasp of grammar. Then after about an hour they paused, and Thomas produced his pain au chocolat and apologized for being quite so angry with him. But then he said, ‘Josiah, why did you visit my college behind my back?’

  Josiah hung his head and said simply, ‘I wanted to know where you worked.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask me? I could’ve taken you round. I would have shown you my rooms, the chapel, the library. It’s a strange thing to do to go on your own.’

  ‘I went to the library. I read a book about Egyptian Mummies.’

  ‘But why, Josiah?’

  ‘I wanted to know what it was like to be you.’

  ‘Then ask me. Ask me anything you like.’

  ‘What goes on in your head day after day? Are your thoughts now different to the ones you had as a boy? Or are they more or less the same, just a bit more complicated?’

  ‘Sometimes I think boys see more clearly. When you’re young you can see the road ahead. Now I’m distracted by the signs on the left and right. I want to do the right thing. But then I ask myself, who put the signs there, God or Man?’

  ‘Why does it matter to do the right thing?’

  ‘Do you ever play chess with your Dad, or some other game?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then with friends at school?’

  ‘I know what it means to play a game, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘A game has rules, and someone made up those rules, and the players have to obey them in order for the game to be interesting, to have meaning. Because, if you continually broke the rules, the game would be both boring and meaningless.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Josiah.

  ‘But you’ll never find the name of the writer of the rules on the box. The game is so presented as to suggest that the rules are out there in the universe, and are here being divulged to the lucky few who bought the game in the first place. It’s the same in real life. When you tell a child not to lie, it feels just like you’re divulging a universal truth to the new generation. But what if we knew the name of the first man who said, ‘I’ve got a good idea. In this game of life, let’s forbid lying. Then we won’t have to waste money in the law-courts, and everyone will know where they stand. It might even make people happier, who knows?”’

  ‘I think that sometimes lying might be a good thing,’

  ‘That’s a very modern attitude you have, Josiah, no absolutes for you. But what would you think of the new rule, “Sometimes lie, sometimes don’t. Do as you see fit.” And let’s imagine that rule was written in 1974, for the latest version of this game of life, and it was written by the great Joe Bloggs, who now has a statue in Trafalgar Square. And great treatises have been written about his rule, and a few have even dared suggest that when Joe Bloggs suggests that we are to do as we see fit, he is actually saying, “do what you recognize to be right, over and above lying” – in other words, Joe Bloggs is an even greater absolutist than the writer of the Ten Commandments. But other commentators might place feeling in first place, and feeling can’t be pinned down at all. Tell me, Josiah, when you tell the truth are you obedient to the ideas of a man, if there were one, who commanded everyone to tell the truth, or are you obedient to something within you or without you which seems to be transcendent?’

  ‘How do you know that I tell the truth?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You have an honest face, Jo, and that’s an honest reply.’

  But Josiah turned away his honest face and changed the subject. He asked Thomas, ‘Why is your college called Corpus? “Body College.” That just seems so weird.’

  ‘It doesn’t quite have the gravitas of the Latin, does it?’ Thomas laughed.

  ‘It’s full name is “Corpus Christi”, though “Body of Christ College” doesn’t sound much better.’

  ‘What does “gravitas” mean?’ asked Josiah.

  ‘It means “weight” or “seriousness” or a mixture of both, really.’

  ‘Do you think bodies are important? I mean, they must be, if Christ had one, and if a Cambridge college is named after his body. Are there any colleges which refer to Christ’s spirit?’

  ‘You mean, such as “Anima Christi” or “Spiritus Christi”? I’m not much of a theologican, but the Spiritus Sanctus seems to have hogged the anima and left Christ with a mere body.’

  ‘Why do you call the body “mere”, Tom? Perhaps that’s all there is, in the end, our bodies.’

  ‘Do you think you’ve got a soul, Jo?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I do know I’ve got a body.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Descartes?’

  ‘No. Perhaps.’

  ‘Descartes would have put it the other way round. He would have said, you might be experiencing the illusion that you have a body. But the important thing is you are the subject of that experience. Cogito ergo sum.’

  ‘“I think, therefore I am,”’ smiled Josiah happily. ‘But I, Tom, I know I have a body. I don’t care what Descartes or anyone else says. Do you feel the same about your body?’

  ‘Well, obviously I hope I have a body,’ said Thomas, tentatively.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Josiah. ‘You hope you have a body! Does that mean you like having one?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question, Jo. I don’t really know how to answer it. Sometimes I forget I have one altogether, and quite often that suits me. I don’t often gets aches and pains. I’m not often ill. That means I don’t have to think about having a body.’

  ‘But what about the good things about having one? Here, give me your arm, Tom.’ (I’m afraid Thomas kept his arm very close to his side, and his one sensation was one of the stiffening of it.) ‘All right, I’ll show you what I do to myself, when there’s a great racket and commotion outside my bedroom door, and I can’t sleep at night, and I need my body to be mine again, far from these… these invaders. I pull up the sleeve of my pyjamas, and I run my finger between the crook of my arm and my wrist, very lightly so that it half tickles. And somehow, because then I remember I have a boundary which they will never infiltrate, I feel better and stronger.’

  ‘Who are these invaders, Jo? Do they exist, or just in your head?’

  Then Josiah remembered one lie, at least, and promptly added another to it. ‘They exist, all right. We live next to a pub, you see, and at closing time the noise can be awful, right outside my window.’ And then, seeing that Thomas wasn’t quite persuaded, he continued apace to distract him. ‘But worse than that, even, is when the boundary of your body separates you from others, when you wish to be pressed upon so heavily that you’re breathless.’

  Thomas paused and said, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘
I was thinking the other day, and perhaps this is the kind of thought you used to have,’ began Josiah. ‘I was thinking that it was a very good thing to have a body, because bodies don’t lie. And I was thinking that bodies that live side by side aren’t any good at all, because that’s not the point of them. They ought to be pressing against each other. Otherwise we might just as well be ideas or something. We might just as well not exist at all. Do you see what it is I’m trying to say?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do,’ said Thomas, co-operatively. ‘So tell me, what’s the name of the pub you live next to?’

  ‘I like having a corpus, Tom, it sounds substantial.’

  ‘Does your father ever drink there?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. The other day, while I was in the library, I looked up the word for “pressing” and found “insisto”, and I thought, yes, that’s what I have, I have a corpus insistens, a pressing-upon body, and I quite liked that.

  ‘Good, Josiah, amusing.’

  ‘But then I thought, “No, that’s not quite right. I think what I really have is a corpus insistendum, a body which ought to be pressed upon.” What kind of body do you have, Tom?’

  ‘What is it that you’re asking me, exactly?’

  ‘I’m asking a question about boundaries and how we break through them. Boundaries are interesting, aren’t they?’

  Thomas sat forward in his chair and asked, ‘Are they there to contain you or to tempt you?’

  Josiah said passionately, ‘Nothing, nothing, will ever contain me.’

  ‘That is a dangerous thing to say.’

  ‘I am dangerous,’ said Josiah, more to himself than to Tom.

  Thomas already knew that. He made some excuse and told Josiah he’d better be going; but when Josiah’s eyes had looked up at him so accusingly on his doorstep, when his whole demeanour seemed crushed, Thomas relented and kissed him tenderly on his forehead.

  ‘Next week, we’ll whitewash those walls,’ he promised.

  Chapter Ten

  IF EVER THOMAS HAD EVER THOUGHT JOSIAH a fool for taking himself off to Corpus, by the end of February the idea rather moved him. In fact, he even sought out the porter who had left the note – Mr Herrod was a reliable, kind man – and asked about what the boy had said to him and where he had gone; he even dared to ask what kind of mood he was in. The truth is, by now he was interested in retracing Josiah’s footprints: for if Josiah had pleaded that he wanted to see the world through Thomas’ eyes, Thomas was keener than ever to see the world through Josiah’s.