Chapter 5
His desire is a flickering candle flame, shame and frustration, want and fear, and it leaves me exhausted, sweating, and a failure. He does not pay.
Days and nights slipped away in an indeterminate haze as Micha gradually recovered.
There seemed to be a never-ending supply of soup, which he initially had to suffer Thomas’s aid to eat and left him pathetically exhausted.
There was also a supply of laudanum, but, unlike the soup, that was very much finite, and he slipped through his supply at an alarming rate.
Thomas had commented only once, though with concern rather than censure, which had led Micha to decant most of the medicine into a stolen glass, secrete it under the bed, and top up the bottle with water.
His thoughts tended to drift rather than cohere, but he was plagued by constant, almost unbearable anxiety about what would happen when the laudanum was gone.
That Thomas suspected his dependence on it he was certain, and yet the thought of Thomas knowing the depth of his dependency was unbearable.
Not because he had any good opinion of Thomas, or gave a damn what Thomas thought of him, but because he was nursing a nasty little dislike that made him resentful and protective of his own weakness.
He had already shown Thomas far too much of that.
Lying in a borrowed nightshirt, upon scrupulously clean sheets, he was horrified to think of the particular care Thomas had taken with his person when he had been helpless and insensible.
And perhaps it was easier to dwell furiously on imagined indignities (ironic, surely, that a whore would have any concern for dignity) than the other truth: how close he had come to death and a pauper’s grave.
None would have been more surprised than Micha to learn it had frightened him.
He could have slipped through the fabric of the world, and no one would have noticed, no one would have cared, if not for the care and notice of a stranger.
It was a paradox impossible to reconcile, hating life and yet fearing death, and it left him with no choice but to despise Thomas instead.
What was the alternative? Gratitude? And he could hardly teach himself to like the man.
Micha had lost those habits long ago and there was no use trying to recall them now.
Besides, once Thomas knew the truth—that he harboured beneath his roof a renter, a bugger, and an opium eater to boot—there would be no more kindness for Micha.
No more interested looks and shy smiles.
Not, he told himself, that he needed or wanted those things.
From anyone. Thomas least of all. But his life was, for the moment at least, comfortable.
And he would just have to hope his health improved, either before Thomas learned who, and what, he was, or before the laudanum ran out.
His strength came back only slowly but sufficiently that he was bored and restless most of the time, while still unable to do anything.
Thomas brought him books and newspapers, but Micha had always been a half-hearted reader.
For the past year, his sole pleasure had been opium, and, while laudanum kept the cravings at bay, it was a poor substitute.
While it smoothed out the rough edges of his mind, it showed him no beauty, brought him no sense of hope or belonging.
It just made him numb. Some days he resolved he would not take any, except the resolution never lasted.
Thomas sat with him often, sometimes talking, sometimes silent.
Micha welcomed him indifferently, if at all, and still Thomas came.
Micha sometimes wondered what he would have to do to drive the man away—if Christian kindness had a limit—but he found he lacked the will to try, and that worried him.
He could no more depend on Thomas’s visits than he could depend on his hospitality.
“You know,” Thomas began, one afternoon, “you must be so tired of listening to my ramblings. I have drowned you in the minutiae of my life, but I know nothing of yours. Will you not tell me something of yourself, your past, your family? Anything you care to share?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“There’s always something to tell the sincerely interested listener.”
“Perhaps the sincerely interested listener can fuck off and mind his own business.”
There was a long silence.
Then Thomas flushed with shame and embarrassment. “I’m so very sorry. I deserved that. I shouldn’t have pried.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
There was another long silence. Thomas had poured himself some tea earlier and was sitting with both his hands wrapped around the cup, soaking up the heat with a certain unconscious sensuality.
“May we then,” he tried, “speak of your interests, your pursuits, your hopes and dreams? I fear you must find your convalescence here rather dull. I would alleviate it, if you’ll let me. ”
“Interests?” repeated Micha, his lip curling into a sneer. “Pursuits? Hopes and dreams. I have none.”
Thomas drew in a sharp breath, and faint furrows appeared across his brow. His face seemed all the more angular and irregular in distress. Micha watched him, surprised into momentary (and later regretted) curiosity.
“Micha.” Thomas’s voice was strange and tight.
“Please tell me what has brought you to this? I ask not because I wish to interfere, or because I expect you to answer me, but it . . . it breaks my heart to hear you speak like this. I have long wondered of the circumstances that . . . that . . . the circumstances in which I found you.”
Micha opened his mouth to say something cutting, then closed it again.
Thomas had put his tea aside and was leaning towards Micha, one pale, elegant hand clutched upon the bedspread, his eyes wide in some mute and luminous appeal.
Micha stared, swallowed, and tried to look away.
But Thomas drew him like a lodestone. He looked so sincere, so naked somehow, and so utterly unafraid of being either.
Given Micha’s behaviour in general, he could not have expected anything but the harshest rejection. But, still, he had asked.
And Micha had thought himself so safe. Everything that had once made him vulnerable, made him stupid and made him human, he had sewn up inside his too-used flesh where even he no longer knew how to find it.
But, just then, for one awful, annihilating moment, he wanted to believe again.
Believe in Thomas, as he had once believed in Isidore.
Had life taught him nothing? Had he changed so little?
Was he the very same fool who had given up his entire self and future for a flimsy promise of love?
“I . . .” Micha managed finally, his attention flicking with some poor shadow of irony to the book they had just finished reading. “I have fallen upon hard times.”
If Thomas had pushed him, Micha might have crumbled into pieces of dust and bone. Instead, he accepted the evasion. “I know. But things will get better.”
“Right.” Micha mustered something of his usual harshness. His eyes narrowed. “What are your dreams, then, Father?”
“Oh.” Thomas gave a nervous laugh. “I suppose I should like to fulfil my duty to my family. And live always with honour and integrity. And serve God to the best of my ability.”
Micha snorted. “Those are your dreams? They sound like a shopping list.”
“Well.” Thomas’s hands waved agitated patterns in the air.
“Obviously one’s dreams are constrained by the .
. . by the expectations of the world in which one moves and the necessity of living a full and useful life, dedicated to higher principles than .
. . than. Oh dear. You’re quite right. I appear to have absolutely terrible dreams.”
Micha spoke without thinking, forgetting far too easily that he disliked Thomas. “What if you weren’t . . . what was it . . . constrained by whatever you said you were constrained by? What if you could do anything you wanted?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“Think now.”
“I am thinking. Um, could I be Richard Burton?”
“No, you can’t. Everyone wants to be Richard Burton. Women want to have him and men want to—” Micha stopped, horrified at what he had been about to say, which was be had by him.
Thomas, however, didn’t seem to have noticed. He was either the most oblivious or the most forgiving man Micha had ever met. “If I must be myself,” he said softly, “may I still travel, perhaps?”
“They’re your dreams. I don’t know why you’re asking me for permission.”
Thomas gave one of his sweet, self-deprecating smiles. “Force of habit, I fear. But very well.” He pressed a closed fist decisively into his other palm. “I would travel. How is that?”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere, Micha, everywhere. France, Italy, Spain, and far beyond. To the places we cannot even imagine. I would like to see other skies. I would like to see deserts.”
“Deserts?”
“Oh yes, I sometimes dream of deserts. The harsh, searing emptiness of infinity. The silence of eternity. And God in every grain of sand.”
There was a long silence. Thomas blushed.
“I . . . I’ve travelled a bit,” offered Micha abruptly. “Nowhere special or exciting. Grand tour stuff, you know.”
“You went on a grand tour?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“My brothers did. I had to study. How wonderful it must be, to know a little of the world beyond our shores. ‘Broadening the horizon,’ I think they call it.”
“My horizon is as narrow as the eye of a fucking needle. Just because you can see through the bars of a cage doesn’t make it any less of a cage.”
“None of the memories bring you pleasure?”