Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  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.

  2

  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.

  Jim looked up to check the cafe for Danny’s arrival, then continued reading. The author was not going to let go his acrimony and questioned how anyone ‘could endure a princeps who was the recipient of lust in every orifice of his body, when no one would tolerate even a beast of this sort’.

  Jim knew very well from less extreme sources that the emperor’s slow procession to Rome could be attributed to a variety of causes other than erotomania. The route was a bad one, and the imperial party demanded the sort of luxurious travel facilities and leisurely stops that were not in the interests of speed. He was also aware that coins inscribed Salus Antonini Aug. and Salus Augusti, struck at the time, suggested that Heliogabalus fell ill some time between 8 June 218 and 1 June 219 and that sickness may in part have been responsible for lengthening his stay in the East. Jim reflected, too, on other omissions on the author’s part and of how Herodian claimed that Heliogabalus sent a portrait of himself dressed as a Syrian priest to Rome to be put above the statue of Victory in the Senate in anticipation of his arrival.

  Jim segued in and out of his Penguin edition, assuring himself that he would give the book a closer reading at home. He wondered how Danny would like his platinum-blond hair, a characteristic he had adopted in imitation of his subject. Jim reflected on how the faculty of empathy had been a dominant trait in him since childhood. He had to his knowledge always possessed the gift of dissolving boundaries and of being able to identify with his particular cast of heroes. This time it was Heliogabalus with whom he had chosen to bond, and he wondered sometimes why he had taken up with an obscure third-century Roman emperor, a man who had left nothing behind but the record of exaggerated sensual depravities. Someone who otherwise would have been forgotten for all time.

  He was policing his thoughts, looking to freeze-frame a motive, when Danny walked in. His head was shaved at the back and sides, with a bleached forelock noodled on to his forehead. Dressed in a white shirt, engineered jeans and an Agnes B jacket, Danny made a habit of marrying casual with designer elegance. The son of divorced tax accountant parents, raised by his mother in New Jersey, Danny had chosen to escape his emotionally damaged upbringing by doing post graduate studies at King’s in London. Jim had met him at First Out, the intimate café-bar in St Giles High Street behind Centrepoint, and the fusing of their chemistries had been almost instantaneous.

  Danny came over to the table carrying a biffed briefcase wedged with books. He discreetly kissed Jim on the mouth, momentarily tweaking his lower lip before settling on to his chair. The catchlight in his pupils twinkled like a constellation, but he appeared removed, distracted in a way that Jim had not known before.

  ‘Get caught in the shower?’ Jim asked, noticing the beads of rain signalling from his friend’s hair and studding the shoulders of his jacket.

  ‘I walked over. The rain caught me along the Strand. Not that I mind. There’s something compelling about London rain to a foreigner.’

  Jim was about to switch conversation when a man he recognized from somewhere but could not place came over and asked if he could have a few words with Danny. He was on his way out, and Danny joined him as he was paying his bill. Jim was not suspicious but wondered why it was taking so long, and when his friend returned to the table he had a folded square of paper in his hand.

  ‘Who was that?’ Jim asked, feeling uneasy at the sight of the paper.

  ‘That’s Richard,’ Danny was quick to reply. ‘He wanted to know if you’d like to join us at the meeting tonight.’

  ‘What meeting?’ Jim asked, his suspicion returning.

  ‘There’s a group of us,’ Danny said, doing his best to sound casual. ‘We call ourselves the Night Watch, and meet at a top floor in St Anne’s Court. It’s not that I’m a regular, but I take it in sometimes.’

  ‘I’ve heard about them. They’re a bit weird, aren’t they? I wouldn’t have thought it was your scene.’

  ‘I don’t know how best to describe them. They’re a sort of political cult, not so much activists as believers in a leader called Slut. Why don’t you come along with me and see for yourself? Their beliefs link in with parts of your research.’

/>   ‘You mean the thesis I’m writing on Heliogabalus?’ Jim questioned, his uptake riding on a thermal of curiosity.

  ‘Come and check it out for yourself later. There have even been Night Watch flyers out in the bars,’ Danny volunteered, clearly trying to make the cult appear more acceptable. ‘And how are you doing with Heliogabalus?’ he added as a footnote, his eye helicoptering over Jim’s downturned Penguin Classic.

  ‘It’s the facelessness of my subject that baffles me. If we go back to Heliogabalus’ beginnings in Emesa we encounter a blank. Nobody has told us anything of his birth or education, and not one of his biographers has described his physical appearance. It’s almost like the historians have conspired to wipe him from memory.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me that a bust of him has survived?’

  ‘Yes, in so far as we know it’s him. The face is of the androgynous kind you would expect. I find myself writing a defence of an emperor who has to all purposes become a fiction. To my mind his so called depravities were little different to those of Caligula, Nero or Commodus, all of whom are praised for their better qualities by the historians. For some reason Heliogabalus was never given a chance.’

  ‘Weren’t they all crazy?’ Danny laughed.

  ‘Up to a point,’ Jim replied, glad of the chance to grow eloquent on his subject. ‘The way I see it is that they all correspond to a type in which obsessive behaviour replaced any notion of a selfless concern with government.’

  Jim could feel himself getting wired by his own intense enthusiasms as the adrenalin started to fire. For the past year Heliogabalus had occupied a central place in his life. He thought of his book as like a drug to metabolism. Its stimulus came up for short concentrated bursts, and then the effects declined as the rush of excitement left the system. He had his doubts that Danny was interested in the subject and suspected him more of being polite than sincere in his questions.

  ‘Didn’t you once tell me that Heliogabalus worshipped some form of phallic stone?’ Danny said, with deliberate pointedness. ‘Our cult have adopted Slut as their icon. He’s the patron saint of faggots.’

  Jim laughed, then almost immediately grew serious. ‘Yes,’ he said in answer to Danny’s question and feeling his knowledge come through. ‘Heliogabalus worshipped some sort of black meteorite that was said to have dropped out of the sky. He had the fetish taken to Rome in a chariot and housed it in an Eastern-style temple on the outskirts of the city. He was a Syrian priest, a sun-god who gave himself the tide “Sacerdos Dei Soli”. But, tell me, who is Slut?’

  ‘If you come tonight you’ll find out for yourself. I don’t want to spoil things for you. If I’m honest, I should tell you that I’m more involved with this cult than I’ve let on. It’s not serious on my part, but I’ve been to a number of the St Anne’s Court meetings.’

  ‘You never told me,’ Jim said, surprised to discover the hidden underside to his lover’s actions. He had not ever had cause to reflect on the possibility of there being another side to Danny: a duplicitous one.

  ‘It was just curiosity,’ Danny replied with throwaway nonchalance. ‘I met Richard in the street one night and he persuaded me to go along.’

  Jim was uncertain as to whether or not he should let the matter drop. He did not want to blow it up out of proportion or appear unduly suspicious, but he was unnerved by the fact that Danny clearly had a secret life. Feeling the first jabs of disquiet infiltrate his thoughts, he was determined to find out more about Slut before dropping the issue.

  ‘I’d rather you told me something about Slut before I agree to come tonight,’ Jim said, the slight quaver in his voice indicating a degree of unease.

  ‘You never get to see his face,’ Danny replied, then stopped dead, realizing that he was committing himself deeper to the subject. ‘He’s blindfolded throughout the ceremony.’

  ‘You’re not answering my question,’ Jim persisted, his imagination filling in the blanks with a series of visually distorted images to account for Danny’s faceless mentor.

  ‘He’s supposed to represent risk,’ Danny said reluctantly. ‘Someone who has martyred himself to numbers on Hampstead Heath and been resilient enough to survive. I suppose you could call him a miracle of resistant immunology. He’s from south London, I’m told, and considers himself a saint.’

  ‘There’s no end to the weird people who inhabit this city,’ Jim conceded. ‘But they’re not half as bizarre as Heliogabalus must have appeared to his contemporaries.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ Danny countered. ‘This man has had arrows shot into his shoulder blades, he’s fire-walked, carried his own cross through the Hampstead woods. You name it.’

  Danny’s sudden willingness to open up on the subject did nothing to allay Jim’s fears. Something told him that Danny’s knowledge of the S&M scene on the Heath may have been derived as much from personal experience as from stories told him of the eponymous Slut. It clearly went deeper than he cared to disclose, and Jim felt painfully on the alert.

  ‘I don’t think they come weirder than Heliogabalus. He was denied a sex-change, married his boyfriend Hierocles, colour-coded his dinners according to a particular theme, cruised the bathhouses for men endowed with big cocks and generally fagged it up in the Senate.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that Slut is his counterpart,’ Danny insisted, ‘but there’s a resemblance in the way that psychological types recur over the centuries.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that,’ Jim said, ‘but enough of comparisons. I’d rather go out for a walk if you’re up to it.’

  Together, they went outside to a packed Old Compton Street. Walking was a pleasure they shared in common, and over the months they had developed a private itinerary that took them on a slow trawl of the West End in the direction of Embankment and the river’s citified haul between Waterloo and Charing Cross. Their pre-dominandy sidestreeted route had become a mutually exclusive map, a way of familiarizing the city so that it formed a miniature grid of reference between them. It was their London, and associations of place resonated in their speech as though the city had grown to be the physical extension of themselves.

  Big clouds with blank faces still jostled across a bleached denim-blue sky. Jim hoped the rain would come on when they were down by the river, so that its green surface would appear pixellated from the downpour. He remembered how, when the two of them had visited the wasteland shore adjacent to Shad Thames, they had, on impulse, made love under cover of a deserted pier. The slap of dead water with its chemical tang came back to him as they headed in the direction of Wardour Street. Part of their circuitous journey involved taking in the Soho boundaries. The pheromonal buzz transmitted by a gay-friendly microcosm never failed to fire up Jim’s chemistry. All along the street a territory had been staked out and politicized by a once marginalized faction, to a degree that allowed in parts for a same-sex ecosystem.

  At the top of the street they took in Camisa & Son, the Italian delicatessen that attracted customers from all over the city on account of its cheese and pasta selection. The usual compound whiff of garlic, salami, mature cheeses and spicy olives breezed effusively from its open door. They filed through the alley telescoped between Wardour and Rupert Streets, with its constellation of dealers rayed out in waiting, and made their way into Brewer Street. The recessed quiet provided by the village always gave Jim the impression they had stepped into a timeless precinct. The end of Brewer Street before it branched left into Sherwood Street was established as the terminating point of their Soho itinerary. Overlapping it, the monolithic facade of the Regent’s Palace Hotel gave on to Piccadilly Circus, with its atomized, fragmented tourist trade creating a distinct separation of energies.

  They browsed the length of the street, stopping to pick up herbal teas in Fresh and Wild, and turned back on themselves. A Rasta bolted down the road pursued by a policeman imparting urgent messages into a radio. The young man’s body as he segued by had reverted to a state of primal fear. Jim could sense the tur
bo-rhythm of his flight-or-fight mechanism as he endeavoured to overtake himself in a mad burn-up for freedom.

  When they got back to Wardour Street clouds were building to a frothy stack of indigo cumulus. The light appeared to have been squeezed out of the precinct. The first tingling berry-sized drops of rain hit them in Rupert Street as precursors of the imminent shower. Neither cared to stand out the rain in a doorway; instead they continued down the street, where a walnut-faced Jamaican crack dealer approached them before derealizing into the crowd. The rain was still holding off, the penumbral cloud-blocks building to a smoky density over central London. Jim felt they were deliberately walking into the storm and risking its violence as an issue that had to do with themselves and the nature of their relationship.

  They cut through Chinatown, on their way to the Charing Cross Road bookshops in which they browsed, the Photographer’s Gallery where they would sometimes meet and take in an exhibition and, veering right from Great Newport Street, the theatre strip along St Martin’s Lane. The sky had now turned inky black, and rain was imminent. To Jim Danny seemed unnaturally distant and to be out there on his own trip.

  Jim took it for granted that they were headed for the river. They had done this so often before, been drawn there and pulled into a magnetic field. They walked on in silence as lightning dramatically flashed through them like photocopier light. There was a brief flurry of rain, then the shower stopped as abruptly as it had started, sending two girls toppling on spike heels clattering down the street for cover. The air was charged and flickery, like someone was playing with a light-switch.