Chapter 7
I could do anything to you, he says.
Yes, I tell him, because it’s the answer he wants. Yes you could.
I don’t say, it’s what you pay for. I normally don’t let my clients restrain me but I’m too drugged to care, too drugged to feel anything as he arranges me and then immobilises me. I should be afraid. I should be vulnerable. I should be ashamed.
But I’m nothing, nothing, nothing.
And I like it.
My body is a soiled thing, miles away, a tarnished trinket given to a stranger’s keeping. He does what he will. And it responds, oh yes, it puts on the required show, feels pleasure, feels pain, feels violation and disgust.
But I am dancing in the dust motes, in the velvet hangings, in the candle flames. I am the gleam in the cheap gilt mirror. I am in the stars I cannot see. I am everywhere and nowhere.
Nothing.
With the click of the door closing behind Thomas, silence enfolded the room once more.
Micha’s mind, however, was carnage. What had just happened?
What had he been offered? And what had he accepted?
He would leave London? This sprawling, festering harlot of a city, between whose thighs ran a river of filth and upon whose blackened breath was always the reek of death.
But she had sheltered him when Isidore was done with him, sheltered him, shamed him, and helped him survive.
Made him who he was. A whore like her, a fitting reflection.
Drowned him in her ugliness until he could no longer tell where he ended and she began.
Until he was just another piece of nothing, lost among eight million other nothings, labouring and suffering and living in vain.
Micha hated London, and yet she was still his only friend.
At his side, glittering in the corners of his eyes, through the long opium-saturated nights, all their secrets bared in a spill of yellow-grey smoke.
To leave would be like leaving himself.
And there was nothing he could imagine wanting more than that.
“Who the hell are you?” George’s voice sliced through Micha’s whirling thoughts.
He started, only now remembering Thomas’s brother was still in the room. “What?” And then, “I’m nobody.”
“Everybody’s somebody.”
Micha shook his head. And, though it was beyond humiliating to have to justify himself to a man like George, he made the attempt anyway. For Thomas’s sake. For even the hope of a different tomorrow. “I don’t mean him any harm.”
Though he knew it was a lie. He was a thief, a whore, an addict, and a sodomite. He could bring nothing but harm to someone like Thomas. Had he been a better man, he would have refused him. Left. But he was too selfish for that and far too desperate.
“And I’m just supposed to believe you, am I?”
George was on his feet. And a moment later, leaning over Micha, hands splayed on the arms of the chair that held him.
Micha was accustomed to yielding whatever of his body was required, but George’s abrupt proximity and the sense of being trapped made him flinch regardless.
George’s hand shot out and caught him roughly by the chin, and Micha swallowed a sound of instinctive protest. He willed himself to calm.
It was nothing. Just skin and bone. Nothing. He was something else. Somewhere else.
“I may not know who you are,” said George, his eyes burning into Micha’s, “or what you think you’re going to get out of my brother, but you may be damn certain I’m going to find out.”
The part of Micha that was currently capable of being rational very much doubted that a gentleman of rank and privilege would think to look for his answers among the rank and file of male renters. And, even if he did, the likelihood of unravelling Micha’s sordid history was slight.
But, nevertheless, he panicked. And, on some level, he was irritated with himself because George was clearly trying to make him panic.
On the other hand, since life had—in a moment of apparently arbitrary kindness—decided to show him a glimpse of, even temporary, improvement, it did not surprise Micha that it was now trying to pull it away from him.
He felt like a street cur fighting for a scrap of rotten meat: a ragged, cornered, starving, frantic thing.
In a typical act of foolish naivety, it had simply not occurred to him to choose a different name when Thomas had asked.
His nerve broke beneath that slight, unwanted touch, and his hand came up, knocking George’s away with an uncontrolled, agitated motion. He would have said anything, betrayed anyone, whatever would convince George to leave him alone.
“You condemn me,” he said, hardly knowing what was going to come out of his mouth, “but a whore keeps your house. Was she your mistress? Is this how you paid her?”
Bewilderment flashed across George’s face, but he was not easily deterred from his purpose. “Look, I want you gone. How much do you want?”
It should have been a familiar question—it was a familiar question—but somehow, in a room where he had sat so often with Thomas, it startled Micha, and seared him, like the crack of birch on skin. And he could find no answer to it.
“A hundred quid?”
There was a sickly rustling of paper, and five rather tattered banknotes landed in Micha’s lap.
He jerked his hands away, driven by an instinct he did not know he possessed.
There was enough money there to buy him anything he wanted.
A decent room, someone to suck his prick, for a change—though he could not imagine wanting that—and all the opium his body could bear.
He could smoke himself sweetly to death with ￡100.
“Two?”
Another sheaf of soiled papers. Falling on him like spit.
“It’s more than you’re worth.”
I used to have pride, Micha thought. Yet, here he sat, silent and ashamed, because George was right.
It was more than he was worth. Far more.
His hands shook a little as he gathered up the notes and smoothed them into a pile.
He should take it and leave. Men had paid him far less for far greater mortifications.
Oh, but Thomas. Thomas. And the promises he had made.
Micha dragged up his head and managed to sneer. “Then why pay it?”
George’s eyes flared. “For my brother, of course.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Be reasonable, man. You won’t get more from him. I’m the heir to one of the oldest marquessates in England. He’s a rector.”
Micha held out the notes. He wished he had the courage to throw them at George’s feet. “Take your fucking money. I said I don’t want it.”
George glared at him so furiously that, for a moment, Micha thought the man might strike him.
But then a strange smile unfurled across his lips.
He plucked the notes from Micha’s hand, folded them neatly, and leaned in.
And, once again, Micha flinched from him, but he had nowhere to go.
He turned his head away helplessly, hating himself and hating George and hating Thomas, too, for abandoning him to this.
George peeled open Micha’s coat and slipped the notes into the inside pocket.
“Keep it, you little parasite.” He smiled, sharp-toothed, falsely sweet. “And when you finally realise my brother has nothing to give you, come and find me, and I’ll double it, just to keep you away from my family.”
Pushed beyond endurance, Micha shoved George away and leapt to his feet, his arms folded tightly across his body to try and control his shaking.
“But don’t wait too long, old man. Because if there’s anything out there about you, I’ll find it. And then I’ll destroy you.”
And Micha ran. Like a thief, like a whore, like the broken coward he was.
He dragged himself up the stairs, as fast as he could manage, barely able to breathe by the time he stumbled into his room and half-fell onto the bed.
As soon as he had the strength to move, he curled himself up tightly.
Fuck George for frightening him. Fuck himself for being frightened.
Fuck Thomas for discovering—after all this time—something Micha still wanted. Fuck everything.
In a little while, he dipped a hand beneath the bed and dragged out the bottle of laudanum Mrs. Clark had brought him. He sat up and mixed himself a draught. It helped still the trembling in his hands, but it could not quiet the turmoil of his thoughts.
I want nothing from you.
Thomas’s voice seemed to echo endlessly through his mind.
What did it mean? Was he supposed to believe it? Everybody wanted something. It was simply the way of the world.
And Thomas was wrong, regardless. He did not ask for nothing.
He asked for faith, hope, trust, all things that Micha had long since forgotten how to give and, even had he not, would never have readily surrendered to another’s care again.
Trust was an invitation to betrayal. Hope an opportunity for disappointment.
And, as for faith, that was a fool’s virtue.
Why give anything, or anyone, that sort of power over your heart or happiness?
But Thomas’s words and careless promises had nudged something in Micha.
Leaving London was a prospect so remote that he’d never even allowed himself to think of it.
He preferred opium’s painless, artificial dreams to impossible ones.
And had always thought the city would be his tomb.
But perhaps Thomas would take him to green places.
He would see stars again. He could pretend to be some other man and live some other life.
As though his body was not a desecrated shrine to the basest lusts, his soul a nest for worms. As though his heart was more than just red meat.