Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  ‘We’re heading for a storm,’ Jim said, breaking a silence that had lasted for much of their journey across town. When he looked up he realized they were making direct for its bruise-coloured eye.

  People were jostling for the Underground, pouring out of Villiers Street to enter its network. Jim laid a reassuring hand on Danny’s shoulder as they turned into the Victoria Embankment Gardens but met with no response on his lover’s part. He was hit by the profusion of pink cherry blossom crowding into view. The flowers always reminded him of Japanese poems: fragile haiku professing a single ideogrammatic season.

  They walked fast, their pace picking up on the storm’s live-wire energies. He could smell the river now, its brackish churn turning over unbiodegradable pollutants. The tide was rising, tracking down from Blackfriars, and he could see the rapid current take on the colour of old rope as it picked up speed under Waterloo Bridge.

  The rain had started up again, this time with steady persistence, but they ignored it in the interests of speed. He noted how Danny’s forelock had been dislodged by the rain and split into a trail of disparate strands and that his eyes were lit with a sexual charge which seemed to be sorting the area for a suitable location.

  They hurried past the Savoy with its imposing Art Deco canopy and broke into a run as the downpour exploded across the gardens. Jim had the impression that with each stride they were running up against a series of glass shower-screens, each one superimposed on the other in an endless illusory sequence. They were being car-washed by the chemical London rain. They bolted in the direction of the underpass and the cover provided by the concrete stairwell under Waterloo Bridge. Vagrants lived and slept in its graffiti-slashed corridor, and there were always ruined mattresses to be found there, together with the residual vestiges of their survival kits littering the floor.

  By now the storm had centred itself and rain was coming down in palpable columns, its driving architecture imposing a disposable liquid city on the one it was in the process of temporarily erasing. They came under cover breathless, clothes moulded to their bodies, the raw animal scent exuding from the stairs increasing their sexual hunger. Jim could hear rain sheeting from overhangs in agitated torrents and its force redoubled on the flyover above.

  There was a wrecked mattress and a slew of discoloured blankets on the ferro-concrete floor but no sign of their faceless owner. Jim could feel the sexual tension coming up in him with the same powerful impetus as the storm outside. Some weird impulse had brought them here, and the danger only increased the excitement. Without saying a word Danny cracked open the zip on Jim’s jeans and went down on him, and he gave himself up completely to his lover’s urgency. He could feel a primitive mambo beating in his blood. All of his mistrust of Danny, his obsessive preoccupation with the boy-emperor Heliogabalus and the more pressingly immediate events in his life were being displaced by the cyclonic pressure in his groin. The incipient climax rooted in him like a volcanic core began to grow more urgent. He cradled Danny’s damp head to him as traffic thundered under the bridge. Their energies were meshed with the city’s as he pushed back against the concrete wall. He could feel London’s giant modem connected to his brain. Venture capitalists, rainmakers, stockbrokers, accountants, their whole collective thrust was being converted by him into sexual data. He could feel black cabs and the whole shunting metallica of the city’s traffic highways laning through his arteries. As Danny increased his rhythm he knew himself the agonized extension of the Waterloo complex, his penis constituting another office tower on the asymmetrical skyline. Sensing his urgency Danny took him in deeper, initiating him into an underworld rite. He could hear the rain slamming down on the flyover as he started to come, the molten aggression of the act rising from a core in him so deep it hurt.

  He stood there, shaking from exhaustion and intense pleasure, his heart racing to explode. In the afterglow of his crisis he had a vision, and it was of Heliogabalus. He could see him as a youth, dyed hair turned damp on a foggy day by the Tiber, the whole assault of life in his nerves at that moment. A body floated by as he stood watching, and Heliogabalus lifted it out by the hair and kissed its slack mouth …

  He was jolted out of his vision by the force of Danny’s hot tongue wedged into his mouth, and his desire working convulsively against his body. It was Jim’s turn to go down, and he pressed the fluted weight of Danny’s cock against his lower lip in an act of measured calibration before sculpting it to his tongue. Giving what he had already received increased his need to communicate pleasure. He could empathize with each resonance highwayed through his lover’s body. He came down on him as thunder reverberated over the South Bank, its nosediving bass-line stomping west in a series of dull sonic collisions. He could feel each successive crash rip through his chemistry. The storm was inside him as it was in Danny’s percussive libido. He took as much of Danny into him as his mouth would allow and rooted for the life-force driven along those veins.

  The thunder returned directly overhead as Jim picked up on the first signs of Danny’s orgasm. It began with a throatily strangled cry, an instantly suppressed exhortation that sank back into the primal dark to be replaced by a rush of pelvic energies. Danny came in a state of ecstatic frenzy, a contorted shamanic dance that worked from the limbic area of the brain to his sex, via all the interconnecting gateways in his nerves.

  He got up from his kneeling position on the cold floor and looked into Danny’s dazed eyes. He wondered for a moment what had brought them here to have sex in a pedestrian corridor slung over the river. He thought of the way gay men identified themselves with public places and of their secret map as it existed all over London, like a network of territorial zones. The kick in it for him was the little nick in time that the fugitive left behind: a scratch on the social fabric, visible to other outlaws, like the red and blue inks of a sailor’s tattoo.

  They stood and kissed, but without warmth, as the expended storm gave over to persistent but lighter rain. Jim knew it in himself that even if someone had mounted the stairwell during the time they were having sex he wouldn’t have backed off. He would have continued impervious to the intruder and without a sense of shame. He would have reinforced their rites by celebrating an act based on the mutual recognition of danger.

  Reconnecting with reality was the hard part. They had created their own space in their urgent need for sex, and now it was necessary to go back to the city on different terms. He had decided to accompany Danny to the St Anne’s Court meeting that evening and to find out for himself what went on there. What they had just done in a corridor used by so many tourists on their way to the South Bank was a complicitous secret to be stored in their privately zip-coded memories.

  Soaked through, and for the sake of convenience, they headed to Embankment and tubed it over to Danny’s apartment at Bedford Mansions for a change of clothes. As Jim stood in the spacious blue-carpeted living-room of the flat paid for by Danny’s mother, he imagined the security that must come from living at a solid address. Reality dissolved behind these walls, and there was no notion of the noise coming from the incessant hard-core traffic as it thundered up Tottenham Court Road. The city was backdropped into a remotely ambient surf. He was glad of the glass of red wine that Danny had poured and settled to its flinty warmth as a pick-up after having been beaten by the violent rains. He could feel the wired tension in his muscles begin to slacken. By the time he had finished a second glass his mood had lifted.

  Although the intense, almost violent nature of the sex they had performed had brought them closer, Jim still felt uneasy about Danny’s recent movements. For the past month he had seemed detached, preoccupied and unwilling to be close. At first he had attributed it to study pressures – Danny had got behind with his work – but over the weeks a certain callousness of manner, and at times a deliberate desire to hurt, had left him feeling cautious of his partner. Danny had refused outright his suggestion that they should live together, and while wishing to remain independent had appeared perfe
ctly natural to Jim he suspected Danny of having extracurricular affairs.

  The disquiet he felt at his friend’s elusively flexible laws within the relationship was suddenly confirmed by Danny reappearing from the bedroom dressed in leather. He had never seen him outside of a smart dress code of designer jackets worn with jeans or trousers, and it came as a shock to realize that his partner evidently had a double life. He had never imagined Danny adopting the ubiquitous butch image of the Old Compton Street bars. It seemed out of character with his natural gravitation to style.

  Danny made no attempt to explain his dramatic transition from Agnès B to used leathers. He seemed absolutely sure of his identity as he massaged cushions back into shape and made minor revisions in the interests of tidiness before going out.

  Outside the air was tonic after the recent storm. They made their way towards Soho Square, its broody custodial plane trees bringing nature alive in a rectangle brokered by media corporates. There were men picking up in the gardens, and Jim looked hard at a sweet-scented viburnum making headlines with its pronounced but slightly dumbed-down April fragrance.

  Soho’s night people were starting to come on as they cut through Bateman Street in the direction of St Anne’s Court. So much of London’s congested nightlife happened here in the clubs, bars and restaurants compacted into its recontextualized village. He wondered if anything as ordinary as a birth or death occurred in its residential lofts. He thought of William Blake parished here in boxy rooms in Poland Street and of the angels who had visited him there, like telepresent guardians of the archetypal kingdoms.

  His head was full of this as they crossed over Dean Street to St Anne’s Court. For Jim the alley was rich with associations, chiefly in respect to its having been the home of the old Marc Almond fan club, Gutterhearts, which had been run from a flat there in the 1980s. He remembered the entourage of Almond look-alikes hanging around the entrance to Trident studios in the hope of catching up with their idol.

  They stopped outside a door painted air force-grey, and Danny pressed the buzzer to the top-floor flat. There was no name on the flat indicator, and the other floors appeared deserted. Jim was aware of the sound of rainwater pouring from a defective overhang into the alley.

  After what seemed an interminable wait a voice on the intercom said, ‘Number?’

  Danny replied instantly, ‘Thirteen/zero plus guest.’

  ‘Come up,’ the voice replied.

  Jim’s suspicions that the building was otherwise deserted were confirmed by the dilapidated state of the entrance and the visible state of disrepair into which the building had fallen. There was no indication of life on any of the lower floors as he followed Danny up a tall, unreliably lit staircase.

  ‘Look out for the gap on the bend,’ Danny warned, with the authority of someone familiar with the house.

  He followed him up to the fourth floor and threw his head up at the sight of a blue slab of night sky blocked into a skylight. The sudden unexpected contact with rock-littered space brought an involuntary smile to his lips. The idea of all that planetary glitter arriving and receding according to the mega-impacted rhythms of Big Bang never failed to excite him.

  The man waiting for them at the top of the stairs was wearing a leather-peaked cap and had a lozenge-shaped scar under one eye. Jim disliked him on sight. He could have been a superannuated leather queen, but there was something cold and inscrutable about his grey eyes. The man nodded at Danny, while largely ignoring Jim.

  Jim followed Danny into a low-lit room screened off from the buildings opposite by black-out blinds. A circle of men uniformly dressed in leather and sitting on floor cushions appeared to be meditating their way into a different space. He noticed that they all wore uniform gold crosses in their ears and from what he could see had the signature of a black snake tattooed on the left wrist as some form of cult identity. The airless room only served to enforce the closed feelings generated by the circle. He felt an intruder in their company as Danny instructed him to sit cross-legged on one of the cushions provided.

  As Jim looked around the room he discovered the word SLUT written on the walls in a number of typographical variants. The word had been disassembled into scrambled orthography, was spelled backwards, with letters inverted dyslexically or written up large in a pink graffiti typeface. There was an air of suspense pervading the room that told him the company was waiting on somebody.

  Jim closed his eyes to centre himself and tried to imagine life without Danny. If his lover really was duplicitous and was mixed up with a leather cult devoted to the worship of a Heath martyr, then he was no longer the person he had taken into his trust. He wondered why there was always a blind side to love, like the stone existing in a peach. He had naïvely assumed that he had found security in Danny, only to discover their relationship was fundamentally flawed. He played with the idea of being free again in the city’s bewilderingly anonymous millions. He would be another solitary man sitting in a bar waiting for the perfect stranger to walk through the door. He would be alone again with his work of recreating a post-biological afterlife for Heliogabalus.

  Jim was shaken out of his slipstream of imaginings by the group beginning to chant. Somebody was busy setting up a mambo rhythm by the use of marimbas. He found it difficult to interpret the words written into what sounded like an incantation and heard Danny’s voice taking up, fluent with the rhythm. Any doubts he may have had about the strength of his friend’s ties with the group were dispersed on hearing how directly he entered into proceedings. Instinct told him to get up and leave, but he stayed on out of curiosity. The primitive hoodoo worked like a hypnotic, the malediction cooking in the chant. He tried to free himself from the spellbinding rhythm and its qualifying sexual motif before finally letting it take over.

  The percussion steadily increased, the beat underlining the voices as they established harmony. He kept his eyes closed so as to shut out the reality of the situation. He knew instinctually that the chant was an invocation to Slut and that at some stage he would materialize in the room. When he opened his eyes briefly he could see Danny completely given over to the music. He appeared to be in a blissed-out state, completely oblivious to anything but the insistent rhythm.

  Jim remained too tense to let go of his senses. His consciousness shifted in and out of the music, got caught up in it, then resisted. When he looked around again the lights had been put on dimmers and the room had darkened. He heard the door open and caught sight of the man he assumed to be Slut entering the room. The emaciated but defined figure was, as Danny had warned him, blindfolded. His naked torso was tattooed with interlocking serpents, and he wore jeans slashed to threadbare ruins. His shaved head showed a blue grizzle of hair-roots around the ears, and his multiple lip and nipple piercings enforced his evident masochistic traits. Jim backed off from any idea of becoming associated with such a cult. If, as Danny had led him to believe on their way over, Slut was periodically crucified on Hampstead Heath, then he looked the living image of his legendary status. Jim found him repulsive and fought again with the impulse to get up and go. He found it hard to believe that this primitive ceremony was taking place above a pedestrian Soho alley. The whole thing was so out of context with his own life that he wanted nothing to do with it.

  When the music stopped Slut began intoning his own mantra. Jim kept his eyes open and watched the whole circle now focused on their leader. Slut was contorted into some form of expositive dance, like an urban shaman attempting contact with tribal spirits. He held an arrow in one hand and appeared to be working the point into his chest in imitation of St Sebastian. Danny and his circle looked on enthralled as the arrow went home, leaving a residual trickle of blood. The first arrow secured, Jim watched horrified as the man began working a second and third into his torso. He showed no sign of pain as he continued with his ritual of self-inflicted torture.

  Jim had little doubt that the ceremony would culminate in an orgy, and he wanted to avoid the possibility at all costs. The
room was becoming suffocating, and bad vibes fizzed in his head. He got up abruptly from his cushion and made for the door. The group were so concentrated on their leader that not even Danny turned his head to watch him go.

  Jim found himself back outside on the badly lit stairs. The doorman looked at him menacingly but made no attempt to have him stay. He simply fixed him with the same inscrutable expression, the same glacial blank.

  Jim ran down the three flights of stairs, opened the heavy security door and hurried out into the alley. He didn’t stop running until he was safely back in the pedestrian flux of Dean Street. When he slowed up he was glad only of his freedom and continued for a while walking in a state of directionless shock. He found himself back in Old Compton Street, its hologrammed bars swimming up at him like the tropical tanks in an aquarium. Men were pressed up against the windows, staring dumbly out at the night crowds, engaged in watching a reality movie. He felt himself for a moment to be part of the same footage. He needed to be alone in the night and decided to walk it back to his studio flat in Paddington Street and use the exercise as a means of offsetting the effects of shock.

  He knew without doubt that he had to break with Danny. Even the panic triggered by the prospect of being alone again seemed preferable to the option of continuing a relationship under these circumstances. He flexed his mind to take in the idea of loss and the inevitable carve-up to his nerves that would come from the split. Already he could sense the damage like broken piano-strings in the pit of his stomach. He wondered how many times he could stand up to being radically deconstructed by partners. He walked briskly, fooling himself as he went along that he was aimed for a new purposeful future. He had his doctoral work as pivotal support for the ruptured days ahead, and he might, he promised himself, take a short break in Rome and sniff out some vestiges of his enigmatic subject’s posthumous legacy. For some reason he found himself linking Heliogabalus with Passolini as he walked into the night. He reminded himself that both had been murdered in public toilets and that both had survived as metaphors for a distinct archetype in the gay world.