Boy Caesar (20 page)

Jim bought a chilled beer at a street stall and inadvertently made sustained eye contact with the assistant, who was undoubtedly a gay boy wearing a chunky gold chain around his neck. They batted eyes at each other in recognition of their secret, while Masako immersed herself in the guide book and manicured a pistachio ice with her compact red mouth.

They headed across town in the direction of Via Giulia, with Jim soaking himself in the atmospherics of a city in which Heliogabalus had briefly flourished. He told himself that, although the Rome Heliogabalus had known had been built over repeatedly in the course of history, somewhere beneath the macro-megatons of its modern counterpart particles of the emperor’s world survived. He found himself against all reason hoping to encounter Heliogabalus in the crowd, half expecting that the image which had burned itself into his mind would become a reality. They browsed through streets glutted with tourists manipulating the obligatory hand-held camcorder or snapping at ruins. A fuming altercation was taking place between the woman driver of an open convertible and the male driver of a dark-blue Porsche. Both had got out of their cars and were conducting a mini gender-war in front of a vociferous crowd who resembled extras on a film set.

They walked in rhythm, sharing the attractions and feeding off the city’s wired energies. They got lost repeatedly, rechannelled their footsteps, negotiated slabs of history on which they had no
conceivable hold and finally ended up at the Ponte Sisto, tired but elated by their discourse with Rome’s frenzied dialectic.

They stopped at a street cafe before crossing over to the right bank and sat outside in the nervy air. Jim looked up to see that the sky had come down like a flat roof on the city, its combination of violet, brown and crushed raspberry colours hinting at the prospect of storm to come. His mind was thrown back to the detonative rain that had accompanied the sex he had shared with Danny under Waterloo Bridge, an episode as apocalyptic as it had been emotionally lacerating.

‘You look like you’re seeing things,’ Masako said, tilting the contents of a sugar sachet into her cappuccino. ‘We’re here to discover your emperor, Jim,’ she added. ‘We must look out for him.’

‘We’re also here to enjoy Rome,’ he replied, his feet kicked away by shock at her insight. It seemed to him that she could access his mind and focus on his deepest inner preoccupations. ‘It’s good just being here with you,’ he continued, attempting without success to sound casual. ‘Maybe I’m imagining things, but time seems to slow down when we’re together.’

‘I’m finding the same. I feel I can be myself with you. Men usually crowd women out.’

‘You’re right,’ Jim laughed. ‘Men have a habit of allocating women a space they can control. I suppose it’s like conditioning someone to fit a grid. The man does this, the woman that and there they stay.’

‘It’s because you know these things that you make me feel good,’ Masako said, looking down and quite clearly engaged in the process of self-discovery.

Jim could smell the busy river as she spoke, its urban scent coming up with the flat tang of pollutants and an indigenous flavour that he associated with Rome itself.

‘It’s crazy, but I’m growing attached to you without trying,’ he said, a wave of shyness causing him to look away at an indefinite point in the distance. He felt both frightened of committing and of not, as he listened to the confused mix of his emotions.

‘Mmm, and me you,’ Masako confided, with equal shyness, her
eyes fixed on the chocolate beauty spots in her cappuccino.

Jim was beginning to let go the emotional bruise that had lived in him as a dull persistent ache for weeks. He could feel with less pain, hope without an interposing negative and, most of all, begin to trust again.

‘I’m enjoying each moment of our stay,’ he said. ‘There’s so much to see and do, and, yes, I’m also keeping an eye out for the emperor.’

‘You should,’ Masako smiled. ‘I bet he’s somewhere in this crowd, reincarnated.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it quite like that,’ Jim reflected, excited at the prospect of Heliogabalus starting out his life all over again in the place where he had been cut to the bone by his assassins. He suddenly had the vision of a blond boy biking through Rome wearing a rhinestone-sprayed jacket, a pink boa and flashily buckled biker’s boots.

‘Let’s make a point of looking out for him,’ Masako said. ‘Let’s find Heliogabalus. We can make that the point of our being here.’

‘I’m excited. I keep getting these visions of a face I associate with the emperor. He’s young, blond and persistent and incredibly made up. He wants something, I know that.’

‘He’s trying to communicate,’ Masako said, bringing out a compact to check on her lipstick, the matt red doing a good job at holding its own.

Jim thought on it and was sure that she was right. During the time he had been researching Heliogabalus’ life an extraordinary chain of events had occurred to alter the pattern of his own. He had broken with Danny, encountered Slut, been kidnapped and had, in part, changed his sexual orientation. Masako, as he saw it, was his redeemer, the person who stood between him and disintegration. That they were sitting together in a street cafe in Rome seemed in itself extraordinary. When he looked up at the sky he had the impression he was dreaming and that the clouds were neurons in his brain. He told himself that none of this was happening, then he refocused the world back into place, and Masako was still there
tentatively retouching her lipstick with a completist’s attention to detail.

‘Let’s go over the bridge,’ he suggested, conscious as he spoke of the symbolism implied by making the journey to the opposite shore.

They crossed over the river’s muddy tract, its olive spine branching away to black eddying pockets. Jim loved the sensation of straddling the city on a bridge and took Masako’s arm as they walked across, stopping to watch a passenger ferry make roiling tracks downriver. High-rise slabs interfaced office towers and media emporia on both banks, but it was the river that held his eye, the same polluted one into which Heliogabalus had reputedly been thrown. Jim found himself wondering at what point along the shore the river would have deposited the remains of his body. A leg here, an arm there, an involuted scroll of organs on some lip of the shore? Heliogabalus’ body had been dismembered like Osiris’, and he felt it his duty to find the lost components and restructure them out of the city’s burning grid.

Caught up in the frantic pace of the Trastevere, they made their way to various landmarks, including the Villa Farnesina, built by Baldassare Peruzzi for the Renaissance banker Agostino Chigi, and stayed a long time there taking in lunettes featuring scenes from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
by Sebastiano del Piombo and Chigi’s horoscope constellations, frescoed by the building’s architect.

From there they made their way under a glowering violet sky to the top of the Janiculum Hill and looked out from that high place over the city’s stacked skyline. They found a small cafe in a piazza and sat outside under an umbrella that reminded Jim of a blue-and-white-striped petunia. They were both hungry and settled for generous portions of vegetable lasagne and a bottle of Chianti.

They talked and ate, and as Jim undid the stitches on his past so Masako followed, unpicking a seam fraction by fraction. He told her that his earliest memories were of the sea and of the rhythm of the tides that had punctuated his childhood days spent in Shore-ham. His had been a lonely upbringing, and something of this had followed him into an equally estranged youth.

Masako had come from a large family and had three sisters and a brother. Her father, a wealthy Tokyo dentist, had left her mother for a leggy Californian blonde when Masako was ten. While she had continued to enjoy a privileged upbringing and education, the vulnerability she felt at the loss of her father had translated itself into an insecurity that required therapy. She described it as an acute undercurrent, the unsettling sensation of being vulnerable to a fear that was constantly there as a reminder of the grief she felt over her father’s desertion. She called it a father-shaped hole, a drop through which she had dreaded to disappear.

They began to learn rudimentary things about each other, selecting with care the molecular building-blocks on which relationships are founded. The construction was by its nature tenuous, but Jim could sense a rightness in the process that made confession easy rather than unnerving.

‘Let’s go back,’ Masako said after they had finished their meal, and they took a bus back to the Ponte Sisto and walked over the bridge with the lights on and the sky smelling of rain. The city was now a digital rainbow of imagery, a modem connecting the collective conscious of its inhabitants to their teeming informational highways. They watched an aircraft lowering on the city, its fins dipping in and out of cloud.

They bussed back from the other side, with the storm still building. A hollow rumble of thunder earlier had come to nothing, and when they got back Jim threw open the bedroom shutters on the oppressive heat. The city’s roar came up to meet him as an electrifying sound-scape, a medley of signatures dominated by the hot blast of traffic.

It was steamy indoors, and he noted how, on sitting down, Masako popped the top fastener on her button-fly jeans and lay back exhausted on the sofa. He took a bottle of wine out of the fridge and collected glasses and a corkscrew from the kitchen. As he did so, he had another flash of the image he had come to associate with Heliogabalus. It was so clear this time that he was left without any doubt as to its identity.

He poured out the chilled wine and heard Masako say, ‘We’ll find Heliogabalus tomorrow. I’m sure of that.’

‘I believe you,’ he said, as he looked out at the unshuttered skyline with its film-set architecture, gantries and shape-shifting digital screens. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but I have this hunch we’re narrowing in on his trail. Do you think he’s seen us in the crowd?’

‘I’m sure he has. He’s waiting for us to signal our presence. I’ll tell you tomorrow where I think we can find him. I have a street in mind.’

‘Are you serious?’ Jim asked, thinking for a moment that Masako was losing it.

‘Mmm. Of course I am,’ Masako stated, giving him the impression she was busy image-scanning her thoughts. ‘I have an idea and I’m going to commit it to my dreams. When I looked at the streetmap earlier, I was sure I had found the place.’

‘I believe you totally,’ Jim said, feeling the wine come up assertively in its lift. ‘I think I’d follow you anywhere.’

‘I would see things even as a child. I used to think it was normal, but on the rare occasions when I spoke about it I was told I was being crazy. It’s like a window I look into. I’ve seen a house and a street and I know we’ll find Heliogabalus there.’

‘The reincarnated Heliogabalus …’ Jim mused, sucking on the prospect like a sweet. ‘What will he remember, I wonder? Everything or nothing?’

‘Fragments. It’s all that any of us remember. The pieces and not the whole.’

‘I had no idea that you had access to the psychic world,’ Jim said, amazed at Masako’s ability to insight her thoughts about death with such clarity.

‘Mmm. It’s not something I’ve learned, it’s something I know,’ Masako replied, sleep starting to film her eyes.

Jim sat looking at his glass, making it the only point of focus in the world and looked up as a half-unbuttoned Masako made for the bedroom. The desire in him remained as a powerful reminder of what had taken place during their siesta, but the urgency had been replaced by other preoccupations arising from their talk about Heliogabalus and the dead. He felt marginally dissociated and had the sensation that only a part of him was really there in Rome, while
the other part was marooned back in London attempting to make sense of his disrupted life.

By the time he went into the bedroom and undressed Masako was already asleep. Her discarded jeans looked like two disconnected lengths of piping draped over a chair. She was lying face down beneath the duvet, an open streetmap placed beside her on the pillow. Still doubting the reality of things, Jim slipped into bed quietly and fell asleep to a freeze-framed image of Heliogabalus daring him to follow down a sunlit alley to the muddy, fast-paced river.

Even as he lay back waiting for Annia Faustina to arrive, he knew he had made a big mistake. While there had been no marriage contract, and he had, in addition, refused to accept a dowry, he had exchanged vows with Annia before returning home alone. His mother and several of his council had been witnesses to the occasion, and he had effectively breached protocol by not attending the festivities that would lead to Annia coming to him later that night.

His pet leopard, Vesuvius, lay beside him on the couch, the animal’s streamlined musculature uncoiled and flexing in a stretch that placed its forepaws out like two studded fists. He had no fear of a creature that could kill him on impulse but, on the contrary, felt secure in its presence. Most people, excepting his inner circle, backed off at sight of Vesuvius pacing the floor like a contained holocaust of energies, and he had little doubt that Annia would bolt from the room on sight of a leopard pounding across the marble floor.

Her father, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius, had insisted on the marriage celebrations taking place at his villa, and Annia was to be conducted to the palace by a procession of musicians and torch-bearers.

Heliogabalus picked at the tondo of baked dormice arranged on a silver plate for his pet and fed the plumpest to Vesuvius, who responded by dispatching the canape with a single incisive bite. He felt no desire at the prospect of Annia coming to him on what was their marriage night, only a sense of obligation in having to pretend to perform the functions of a husband. The situation was additionally strained by the fact that Annia’s previous husband had been put to death under Heliogobalus’ government, and he wondered if her motives for marrying him were in part inspired by a morbid attraction to himself as nominal executioner.

Not that he really cared. His mother had suggested he remarry
in the interests of pleasing the Senate, and he had acted on her advice. Annia was not only a widow, but she was middle-aged, conventional by his standards and doubtless little prepared for his unusual lifestyle. That he was prepared to spend all day arranging flowers in his room, disputing with the chef about the exact qualities of porcini mushrooms or deciding with Antony on the merits of a particular blond hair-dye, would, he imagined, exasperate any woman expecting a show of masculinity from her new husband.