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 fullbloom, 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 wasthin 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.
