Boy Caesar (15 page)

As the Toyota came up parallel with a number 168 bus at the Pond Street intersection, the man with the bat tattooed on his neck winked at him in a manner that seemed to say ‘It’s all right.’ Jim looked out at the free world and saw a blonde reading at the near-side window of the bus. There was no chance of him making eye contact with her, and anyhow he existed in a parallel universe.

They took off up Rosslyn Hill, past the police station on the corner of Downshire Hill and into a mini-tailback of red brake lights. The rain had given over and the moon trained a white spotlight on the city. Jim felt even more certain now that they were headed for the Heath with its busy nocturnal scene.

His suspicions were confirmed as the driver took the right-hand turn at the top of the High Street and accelerated up the hill towards the landmark of Jack Straw’s Castle, the pub’s imposing white facade pointing the entrance to the East Heath’s deep oak-woods.

They pulled up in the pub’s car-park, and Jim was told that he was to accompany the men on to the Heath. ‘We want you to meet someone,’ he was told by the man on his right. ‘We’ll take the hand-cuffs off here, but it’s not in your interest to try and escape.’

Jim felt instant relief as the constraining metal was removed from his wrists. He flexed a hand, aware as he did so of increased circulation. He followed the men out of the car and down a track that led to a dense cluster of trees. The moon had come clear with the quality of substitute daylight, giving to the immediate landscape the look of a reversed negative. As they struck down the track he could see a light glowing in the wood, as though posted there to signpost the way.

Jim could just make out figures going in and out of the trees and realized they were the undercover cult who occupied the woods after dark. He had never visited the place before at night and had heard of its legendary status only from those who got high on the dangers implicit in anonymous sex. His vulnerability would never
have allowed him to come here in the dark and risk being compromised or even attacked.

As they drew nearer the wood he could see that the light came from what looked like a number of lamps placed on one particular tree. Somebody stepped out of the dark in front of them, looked in their direction and was instantly swallowed up by leaf cover. He could hear somebody else wading through bushes before the silence flooded back. The landscape appeared to be alive with fugitives dissolved into their places of concealment as black on black.

A froth of rainy foliage exploded in his face as they ducked in under overhanging branches. The man in front knew precisely where he was going as he led the way into an alcove where the trees formed a roof over a clearing. Jim could make out a circle of men grouped around the light, obviously convened there for some sort of ritual. They had lit a fire from branches, and a busy orange flame had started to draw, the smoke snuffling from wet undergrowth. He was certain he could see Danny in the group, a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes, his leather jacket twinkling with studs.

Jim stood there, still unable to believe that what he was seeing was real. He avoided looking at Danny and kept thinking that if he closed his eyes the whole thing would disappear.

‘This is Jim who was with us last night,’ the tattooed man said to the group. ‘He’s the one we thought needed to find out more.’

Jim was about to protest his innocence but decided against it, realizing he was up against the group. The faces concentrated around the light were ones he recognized from St Anne’s Court: the same shaved clones, metalled with studs and rings and singularly focused into a perverse phallocentric culture. The shadow they projected seemed more intense here and to be an extension of the surrounding night.

Jim was told to sit, and he took up his place by the blood-orange fire. He could hear rain tapping the leaves on the outside and pitting drops into the flames. A tall cross, fashioned out of branches, had been thrust into the burning, and he assumed this was part of the ritual. Some of the group were chanting a mantra, the low vocal grumble sounding like a bee was being passed from lip to lip. The
vibration was contagiously hypnotic, and without knowing it he felt compelled to join in. Something was speaking through him and casting a spell.

The chant stayed unwaveringly level, once it had established its own autonomous volume. He experienced it as a sort of molecular energy, something almost palpably alive in the dark.

He didn’t know how long he had been chanting, only that the fire had caught to a sharp blaze and the acrid smoke prickled his nostrils. Somebody was in the process of building up the flames, and the chant had dropped to a barely audible hum, like it was shortly about to end.

The group remained sitting, and Jim opened his eyes to catch the circle in a state of meditative repose. He could hear nothing now, but a branch lifted by the wind and the accompanying volley of raindrops. They could have been seated in deep countryside rather than in an area of woodland tracked by officious police, the place seemed so remote.

As Jim continued to stare at the flames he became aware of a noise in the bushes that sounded like someone coming towards them dragging a chain over the ground. He immediately thought of Slut. It was the sound he had heard the previous night when Slut had entered the room, the jangle of a masochist’s self-chosen instruments of punishment, this time forcing a way through undergrowth.

The sound grew closer, the indiscriminate snapping of branches suggesting the person was wading through obstructive growth without concern for safety. The crackle sounded like fire as it travelled steadily towards them with its snappy commentary. When Jim opened his eyes he could see Slut standing there in the reflected light. His torso was naked, with chains roped around his jeans at the waist. He looked every bit the self-professed martyr, body strafed by the lacerating whiplash of branches. He stood with his face turned to the ground, as though self-debasement was something that set him apart from humans. He carried the same air of perverse distinction that Jim remembered from last night, only now Slut was there as a nocturnal journeyer, someone who belonged to this
wooded precinct and who had evolved from its indigenous culture. He half expected to see leaves sprouting from his skin and hair, his identification with the Heath was so complete.

Jim rose with the others as they stood to form a circle around the fire. Slut made a deferential sign that they were to resume sitting, and Jim selected a dry spot at the bole of a silver birch. He could hear the rain coming and going in short-lived attacks, the sudden ripple of it in the leaves sounding like small stones pinged at glass.

Slut stooped over the fire, warming his emaciated body, and put his hands out to the flames. He could have been someone partially screened by dry-ice on a low-lit stage, as his spare gestures asserted their usual hypnotic fascination. His body language clearly substituted for words, and he continued to use the fire to advantage, moving in and out of the light to stage his drama. He went through the contortions of what looked like a shamanic dance, arms thrown out to the trees, his wasted body showing its ribcage and the taut stretch of tattooed skin over bone. The firelight threw now orange, now blue choreographed patterns of light over him. Jim thought of Slut as a demented fire-eater, someone swallowing his cult and their orgy-tree in a series of omnivorous gulps.

Without warning, or it may have been a trick of the light, he appeared to walk straight through the fire, but it happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. The smoke was growing cloudier and transmitting dense blue clusters that worked themselves upwards through the trees. The whole scene was like a chiaroscuro painting, and Jim followed Slut’s movements in and out of the light with polarized concentration. He had forgotten even his sense of resentment at being brought here against his will and of the danger in which he was placed.

One of the circle got up, moved towards Slut and placed an ivy wreath over his head. It was clearly, Jim observed, part of the ritual, and Slut responded by engaging in a jerky, animalistic dance around the flames. When the smoke cleared he could make out Slut’s body posted against a tree-trunk.

The group now rose and formed a circle around their leader. They were chanting again, but this time in a manner that incited
frenzy. Slut had adopted a crucifixional pose against his tree and had thrown his arms out horizontally, so that he appeared to be an integral part of the rough bark. Although the group seemed to have forgotten about him, Jim followed, feeling totally absorbed by the action.

The dance had begun, and he felt too stunned by events to stand back from them and too engaged in the ritual to think. As people joined hands in their celebratory romp, he had the feeling that the whole wood had come alive and that the trees were also participants in the ritual. Someone had fed the flames with a swatch of branches, and the fire busied itself with renewed energies. Jim was breathless as the tempo continued to quicken, the momentum sustained by group impulse. He felt hot, dazed and on the point of dropping, only to be forced around on the muscular circuit that kept Slut at its core. Just when he felt like giving up, his lungs full of smoke, a new jab of current would inject him back into the dance.

They were trampling the undergrowth flat as they pursued a groove around the orgy-tree. The whole wood crackled with their animalistic stamping out of a territory in a manner that was defiantly unlawful. The heat was turned up, and Jim felt the circle start to contract as it narrowed in on its victim. The pace had slackened, but the chanting continued to assert a powerful, rhythmic hold. It was the force managing them as they closed in on Slut.

Jim watched as one of the group broke rank and pulled a torch from the flames and brandished it at the night sky. People were growing increasingly reckless as they narrowed in on their target. The excitement raced through Jim’s blood, propelling him forward. He was beyond exhaustion and impelled to live out the experience to its end. He wondered what Masako would think if she could see him now, transformed into a horned creature ravaging through heathland with a group of sexual outlaws.

They moved in closer on Slut, who remained motionless, head thrown back in what looked like a state of ecstatic trance. He was fascinated by the man’s ectomorphic body and how his skin was a road-map of grainy scars. He could see clearly now that Slut had ropes attached to his wrists and was probably waiting to be lifted and tied to the tree.

Jim felt himself choking as the smoke thickened like fur inside his throat. He noticed how the wind pushed the full assault of it in Slut’s face and how he never once flinched from the billowing irritant. He remained rooted in the position he had adopted, like he had grown into the tree’s body and had taken on its punished and twisted anatomy.

When the chanting stopped the circle came to an abrupt halt. The man carrying the torch held it up as a fisted salute, its signal raging in the solid dark.

Jim watched as two of the group climbed to an overhanging branch and, assisted by those below, managed to lift Slut up and tie his hands as two horizontals to the branch. With his feet lifted off the ground his ankles were fastened to the tree by rope secured around the trunk. Slut’s identity as the wounded god had been achieved with a facility that shocked Jim, so quickly had it been managed.

He squinted through the diffused smoke at Slut who had thrown his head to one side, looking like a giant lizard slung across the warped bark. The man holding the torch continued to thrust it up vertical towards Slut’s face, so that the light crawled over him in an orange flickery shimmer.

The group set up a slow liturgical chant that hung on the air. The torch-carrier now stood directly beneath Slut’s raised body, and Jim could sense the sexual expectancy shared by the group. He, too, felt the excitement rush to his groin, as the measure of an experience that both thrilled and terrified him. The wind dragged bushy clusters of smoke back at them, and he temporarily lost sight of Slut through the dense, curling clouds. Suddenly he froze, as a voice like a bird’s cry issued from the tree, inhuman, raspingly pitched and shredding the silence. He knew instinctively that the sound was coming from Slut and that it was the cry of the wounded man strung up on the orgy-tree.

It happened a second and a third time, as the note of a shaman communicating with his tribe through the pitch black. The group responded with similar bird-like cries, having Jim think they had been transformed by the rite into ground-hopping owls. He could
see that the two men nearest the tree were in the process of stripping off their jeans and that the anticipated orgy was about to begin.

There was rain again slashing through the foliage, cracking the leaves like the sound of nuts being shelled. It was coming on harder now and drumming the flames with an insistent sputter.

Jim lost his footing for a moment and fell back into bracken exhausted, his face exposed to the cold night rain. He lay there gasping, up-ended and unwilling to rise. As he sat up he heard shouts coming from the bushes, followed by a piercing succession of whistles. There were lights moving through the trees, and he knew without doubt it was the police.

He got up and listened to the sound of people crashing through the wood, flashlights advancing ahead of them in crazily shifting radials of light. He guessed immediately the Heath Police had been alerted by the blue rollers of smoke surfing above the tree-tops.

They were coming closer, and he stood there confused, uncertain whether to stay or run. He looked towards the orgy-tree at Slut’s immobile body grafted to the bark and heard someone shout, ‘Quick. Get out of here. It’s the police.’

He didn’t waste a second. Without knowing where he was he took off into the dark, forcing his way through the wood in the opposite direction to the fire. He ran with his hands stretched out in front of him for protection, terrified that he was being pursued. He could hear shouts behind him and guessed that the police had discovered Slut roped to the tree and were rounding up whoever had remained behind.