Chapter 1 #3
Johnny Wu sat down on the edge of the bed next to Micha and laid out cloth, an oil lamp, a pipe, and a small pot of cooked opium.
From his box of tools, he produced an opium needle, dipped it into the treacle-thick opium, and held it to the flame, turning it carefully until the droplet had swelled and crystallised into a perfect, amber-coloured jewel.
A jewel that was worth more to Micha than all the treasures of Christendom.
The process continued until Johnny Wu had toasted enough opium to fill the pipe bowl, at which point he passed it to Micha.
Micha’s fingers trembled upon the bamboo stem as he held it over the lamp.
Then he took it deep into his mouth and sucked, the pipe gurgling its sweet seduction as he swallowed down the smoke.
A few threads of yellowish vapour drifted up from the bowl, dissipating to nothing in the fetid air and taking with them time and truth and everything Micha wanted to forget.
He fell back against the bolster, eyelids flickering, the stupefaction of bliss easing the harsh, cynical lines of his face.
In a little while, the pipe was done, and Johnny Wu made him another and then a third.
Micha would have smoked all night had his funds allowed it.
But, for now, he was content, surrendering himself, moment by moment, to the spell of opium.
Like falling into feathers. The room was beautiful.
The shadows spun mysteries from the corners.
The wind played symphonies on the paper that covered the window.
The mould that wound its intricate labyrinth across the ceiling was the colour of the Chartreuse he had drunk in Paris with Isidore.
Oh Isidore.
In this wavering light, he looked like an angel of alabaster and gold.
Micha gazed at him, full of loss and the habit of wanting, knowing a chimera when he saw one but stripped of the ability to care.
He opened his arms, and Isidore came into his embrace.
He was as insubstantial as ashes and the promises he had made, slipping through Micha’s clutching fingers like a sinner’s hope of paradise.
Memories swirled through him with the smoke.
Here, they could not hurt him. He could live them, again.
With Isidore, on the wide, quiet streets of Oxford, when the wisteria and the magnolia were in full bloom, and the bells sang out their love songs over the gabled rooftops.
Come with me, I love you. Paris in the spring, its flower-strewn days and sparkling nights, where sin was not sin, and kisses did not always have to be stolen and all touches covert.
I love you, I’ll never leave you. The hushed marble severity of Rome, the dazzle of sunlight on the canals in Venice, the pale white-gold streets of Vienna.
And then, Dover, grey cliffs, grey sea, grey sky, the newly unfamiliar English cold, where everything was broken.
I believed you.
But Isidore only kissed him with the ghost of his mouth.
And then Micha followed him from the room, down the stairs and into the night. The huddled houses sighed and stretched in the arms of the misty dark. His mind expanded to fill the empty spaces of the city.
He walked. Westwards. Into the light. Isidore, always slightly ahead of him, slightly out of reach, gleaming through the gloom, pristine as a pearl.
The rain came down in earnest now, slicing through the fog, coating Micha in the silver of fallen stars.
He held up his hand so he could watch the way the water streamed over his skin, making him shine, as though he could be cleansed.
Miniature rivers spilled down his fingers, mingling and parting, crossing each other sometimes and then breaking away, cutting their own paths across his palm.
He was a tear in a flood of tears, travelling the furrowed landscape of his own hand.
But he was still watching too, each and every drop a diamond, and the city watched him, with a thousand gaslight eyes, and he watched the city, and he was the city, and he was the raindrop.
He was everything and nothing and saw everything and everything saw him.
And though he could not predict the course of the water over his palm, the chaos of it was so swift, so lovely, that it felt directed, part of the same pattern that bound him to the city and the city to him.
Tiger Bay lay behind him. The Thames curled languorously at his side.
Even opium could not make it beautiful, but now the smog was thin enough that Micha could see the moon.
It was a pale, distant thing, half-smothered in mist and shadows, but its light gilded the rough brown waters like a crown.
In the tobacco-stained sky, the stars were tiny, cravat-pin promises.
He wandered through Cheapside. Unlike Bluegate Fields, which stirred itself like some nocturnal monster only as the sun slipped away, these thoroughfares were quieter.
He saw the reflection of the cloud-chopped sky in the rut-riven road.
In every puddle, a universe gleaming. Whole cities unfolding themselves in half-glimpsed corners.
The doors of the world lay open. Everywhere was horizon.
He turned his face into the rain, into the light, into the possibility it promised.
He was shuddering uncontrollably with the ecstasy of hope.
He felt, perhaps, there was some meaning, some grandeur to his life, that he did not walk always straight and narrow streets, in darkness and in shame.
If only it did not die in the dregs of morning, this certainty, this connection, this faith.
He did not call it God, for Micha had given up belief with everything else.
But, for a too-swift moment, he felt alive and as if, in some way, it mattered that he was.
Even though he knew that with every passing day he fell a little deeper, mattered a little less, suffered a little more. He was buried, in flesh, in brick, and the sky was a coffin lid.
And Isidore was growing as faint as the moonlight.
Don’t leave me alone.
Micha began to run. His limbs were leaden, his heart felt tight and hot, like a piece of coal. His breath clogged his throat.
Distantly, he realised something was wrong.
He was still shaking, not as he had thought, in joy, but in weakness. And though he did not feel cold, his sweat was mingling with the rain and the moisture that leaked from his eyes.
Isidore was gone by the time Micha staggered onto Drury Lane.
The world splintered into pieces of light.
He couldn’t breathe.
And he couldn’t stop trembling.
People jostled into him and then recoiled. They came spilling from the theatre like coloured beads. And he was falling with them.
Into a smear of darkness.
And nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
121
It’s been a long night. A party of gentlemen, slumming it.
I just want to sleep but Madame Defleur tells me someone is waiting.
Two of them have already shared me. Apparently it isn’t sodomy if you do it with friends.
I clean myself and struggle into my clothes.
My value tends to decrease if I look too used.
When he comes in, I enact the usual sad pantomimes of desire but when the moment comes, he rolls away from me.
Like this, he says.
It’s the only words he’s spoken. I’ve heard there are such clients.
Philip says they often come to him because he does not threaten them.
But I am too tall, too dark, too much a man, whatever that means, and so I am mastered, not master.
When surprise wanes it leaves me with only annoyance.
This requires performance more than acceptance, and I am tired, tired of everything.
I try to use my anger, to take from his flesh the price so often wrung from mine, but I am only ashes.
I prepare him with oil, ready a sheath. He is so tight.
I could hurt him so easily. He gives me nothing but the changing rhythm of his breath.
And when I have him, he drops forward onto his elbows, sweats and shakes and muffles himself in the silk pillows on the bed.
It’s strange to see the effect of my usage upon his body.
Only strange. Release comes as though from the bottom of a deep and silent well.
Afterwards, he turns onto his back and lies unmoving.
His eyes pass back and forth across the canopy like ants.
Why won’t he leave? We do not touch but the heat that radiates from his skin is like a thread of fire that runs the whole length of my body.
Today I am to be married, he says, as he leaves in the grey dawn.
A stranger’s voice, refined, impatient: “For God’s sake, Thomas, come away.”
Micha was lying on the ground. A man in evening dress was leaning over him, apparently heedless of the mud and filth upon which he knelt. He was peering down at Micha, and his face was neither beautiful nor kind.
Micha tried to sit up, tried to say something.
It took all his strength just to open his mouth, and when he did, he felt like he might vomit.
He collapsed onto his side, struggling to breathe.
And suddenly he was choking, coughing, painfully and helplessly, blood, spit, and mucus spattering the ground and the backs of his hands.
The protective haze of opium was faltering.
The world closing in again. He felt wretched and mortified, locked into a body he hated and a world that despised him.
“Come away. This could be any manner of contagion.”
But the one who knelt would not be moved. “This man is ill. He needs help.”
“Then he may go to a workhouse.”
“I-I . . . am quite well,” interrupted Micha, dragging his voice from his raw throat. He made another attempt to stand, which brought him to his knees in short order. Dark smudges filled his vision, like the burned-out afterimages of suns.
“You are not.” An arm caught him about the waist. Micha tried to pull away, but the man first addressed as Thomas was too strong for him. “Who are your friends?” he was asking, with consideration rather than warmth. “Your family? May I see you to them?”
Micha realised that his accent had misrepresented him. They must have believed him respectable. “I have none.” And before the stranger who held him could react, he added with a sneer, “Nor do I wish any.”
There was a moment of silence at the heart of a busy street. Pressed as he was in the crook of his arm, it was hard for Micha to avoid Thomas’s eyes. They were brown, plainly brown, but arresting in their warmth, and all the more so in his austere, patrician face.
“You heard the fellow.” Thomas’s companion shifted from one foot to the other. “I’m due at the club.”
“Then you must go to your club.”
The man made a sound of ill-repressed frustration. “Must you make Christianity an affliction, brother?”
The stern mouth quirked into what seemed its more natural shape, a smile touched by a hint of whimsy. “‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, but the greatest of these—’”
“Oh be quiet.” His brother turned up the collar of his greatcoat and strode into the mist.
Micha shoved Thomas—with his deep eyes and gentle mouth—away from him.
Oxford had been lifetimes ago. He had nothing but pieces of Greek, fragments of Latin, and a thousand memories of Isidore.
But his tutor had been a patient, learned man who had not laboured entirely in vain.
The words tangled around his tongue as he tried to speak them.
“‘The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour: but the way of the wicked seduceth them.’”
Micha delivered his rejection and did not look back. He took a few faltering steps, away from Thomas, away from the theatre, back towards the East End. And then weakness overtook him, darkness snatched at him, and he discovered he was on the brink of fainting for the second time that evening.
Thomas caught him before he fell. “Whether you are wicked or not, I think I must insist that you bear me company.”
Micha struggled on some combination of principle and instinct. “I won’t go to the workhouse.”
“No, of course not. Come with me, and I will see you safe.”
Safe? Micha tried to laugh, tried to push the man away, but shards of glass were breaking in his chest and his mouth was thick with blood and all he did was fall into the stranger’s arms.
64
The usual mechanics, body to body, skin to skin, in and out, in and out, making the noises he wants me to make. Behind my eyes, nothing but blank darkness, sour and solid as a wall.
The man called Thomas had access to a carriage. Micha drifted in and out of awareness as he half-sat, half-lay in the velvet gloom.
He was cold, then hot, then cold again.
He shivered and sweated.
When he coughed, it felt like he was dying, as though it was the remains of his own heart’s blood he was bringing up.
Occasionally, moonlight would fall hazily through the window across the stranger’s face. Strong features, cold lines, like something from the portrait of a bygone age, a living testament to English breeding: centuries of pride and privilege rendered in cold stone.
512
Wanting coins for the dragon, I let a sailor have me against a wall for a shilling. I scrape my palms raw while he ruts and I shake with need, though not for this. Never anymore for this.