To Margaret:

Voice of velvet, voice that cracks:
Drunken, reeling, thread of spit –
Relic of that ancient cult,
Of Fiction dispossessed, of
Structure as the common Lɪᴇ:

That, she’s found in a tipping glass.
Drinking deep, she flits, my Margaret,
‘tween curtains, veils,
The coloured panes of glass,
That distract the church-goer, who,
All in all, believes very little.

Flitting from distortion to another,
Each a different face, each herself,
Oh, then somebody else’s –
What it is, to choose a costume over the other!
In choosing one’s skin, one chooses their enemy.

If the world is shattered when the rum is gone,
Shall we weep?

Already, she is made blind,
Stupid, senseless,
The last drop is downed, and
She is transported –
Another brightness cleared –
All is one, all is all (said the baseless philosopher),
That is the Reveller’s one Tʀᴜᴛʜ.

One could say that her ankle
May twist or break,
Her voice be drowned,
Body placed in shallow waters,
For the gentle fish to tear asunder,
For the mother croc to feed her babes;
But the last veil will be dropped:
This is of no consequence.

O, the last veil will be dropped,
The last pane smashed to rainbow dust,
That is to lungs like razor.
Only then is she most herself,
Being all the selves, all the masks
Of joy or obligation.
(No questions are asked to stones,
Cool, unchanging; or to running water,
Rushing river, interminable drivel.)

The true face is a conjunction,
Of sawdust and steel, but
Crueller than sweet, sharp of
Cheek, gut of boiling bile.
Like Orlando, she was discovered a man
only after.

Pleasantries

By late afternoon, they were back in the wood, knee-deep in the slick, careful of any stone that would make them misstep; Dylan and Erik and he, one hollow-cheeked, the other as lively as the vacuum ‘round his boots would let him, and the other – oh, the other, thinking of everything and nothing, that is, forgetting each thing – first he would see a starling, hear a warbling and smile to himself – and return to numbness. He stroked his russet chin, rough, as if burnt by candle, hanging behind the others, the other hand in his pocket.

His expression changed very rarely, and only in relation to his inner stirrings, however drugged they were. The weight of a world, he knew, could be a nepenthes pharmakon, if one concentrated enough. “I am a brigand,” he thought. “And Life is my coinage,” though he could never part from his, not yet. “The word is Murder.” This he repeated over and over again, until the words lost their meaning, and he might as well have been thinking of the sandwiches he’d asked Lottie to make, or wondering if finches mated for life, or if permanence was attainable to any man at all.

To mislay something is to turn it to dust, like the magic in a rune, or a path through the wood. To forget it is to strip it of everything. And he had learned this lesson by heart.

Erik led them both – “Boy as Commander”. Not Mrs Ripon’s portrait of him, warmly received at the Grosvenor, titled “The Young Reveller”, flushed flesh and blossoming magnolias – for El-Gabal was a primitive god, much older than the one some call “father”. In his canvassed likeness, he seemed old as the trees, as the fruit and the rejoicing of birds, heavy-lidded, his smile suggestive of sensual knowledge. But whoever said that Erik was this always would be a liar. There was – now, this very moment, the moment he lived –  something distinctly modern in his excitement. The pursuit of glory, and not a care given to its achievement. This Erik – and there were many Eriks, in the meat and blood and bone branded by the name – sought pleasure in adventure for adventure’s sake. As Richard himself sought drunkenness for drunkenness’ sake.

The thrilled body-called-Erik regressed to the most savage of ages – boyhood. All twenty-six years peeled from scalp to cheekbone to chin. He was new and thought he knew everything. It was a feeling he’d missed verily. And this he did relish.

Suddenly, he had the haunting impression that he was forgetting something, and retreated two trees.

“Oy! Richard!”

Richard wiped his brow.

“Will it be done soon?”

“We are the closest yet.” Erik started again.

Richard could not admit he longed to go back and forget it all, as soon as his memory let him, as soon as the drugs and the drinks and the lotus-flower conceded him rest. So they trudged on, servant and master alike, behind he who felt himself an illustrious son, a vanquisher. (That is the feeling one gets, when he strangles a cat with wire.)

And so edged the gloom. Dylan wore it the worst of all: he could not look at either of them. His hand had frozen to the steel of the shovel, painless, shaking, and somebody else’s. It was for the best, that he was not truly there. Richard felt something like pity for him, only for a second. But as it would have made it all more difficult, he decided to forget, and so he did, until they reached the ravine where they had flung him.

What had his name been? The boy – well, it had been a boy once – had told him. This, too, he had put in the back of his mind, for they were two miles from Greyslip and this was his land –  that the thought would shake him was ridiculous, now that he had nearly overcome himself. He reminded his brain of the following: He was still a Lord, the last of his house, though he did not rule – and for once he was thankful that there were no men for him to govern. By the thirties, no peasant had made his home in the wood for a century. Not that he would have had any authority on them, either. Being aware of this reassured him, like a child being told a story.

The boy they’d thrown over had wanted a silver coin. A “piece of eight”, he’d said, though the currency was long out of favour. He’d been a Stevenson boy – like Erik, if he thought about it. Looting was no different from asking, if the other was expected to yield. One a trickster, the other a whore, both pillagers. One dead and the other leading him to the gallows, to die a lovers’ death, if they were lucky. They might even be hanged side by side, each hearing the other’s bubbling and choking. This, too, comforted him.

The corpse was like they had left it. Face up. Flies swarmed about his eyes and lips and genitals. (Nobody had clothed him. Only now did he see it as a discourtesy.) Already, the scent of Death – of rot and damp wood, the soft muttering of lice. Yellow over gray, webbed with violet, especially on the back, where the blood had pooled inside him.

Erik looked down, pensive, put his foot over the ledge and turned around: “Which of you will climb with me? See, it is not steep.” He kicked down a pebble. Indeed it was not – there were hardly two metres from where he was standing to the bloaty belly and glazed eye, and the buzzing. He put a hand on each hip, his eyes darting back to the work of his doing, giving the others a view of his back – Richard saw the silhouette of a coin, in the left jodhpur pocket, the brown leather one he’d nicked from a certain lady, which shaped his bum so nicely --  a doubloon? Surely not. He thought not. Even Erik would not have been so cruel. Though he was of a different land, that Richard did not know personally, and thus suspected of savagery, being himself an Englishman.

Erik turned again, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Of course! It is so, so, very obvious. You, Mr Harvey, have the shovel. A miracle you haven’t lost it. You haven’t said a thing! The whole walk! To think of it!” He laughed so hard he bent at the stomach, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “Forgive me. I have hurt your sensibilities. I knew you were your Mother’s boy. What I mean is, will you aid me with the finishing touch? Be assured that, as a work of art, I claim all the credit. Burying him is no different than feeding him to pigs. I say it is better. And who better than you, footman? Boy? Gentleman?”

He paused, and turned serious. “Which of them are you, anyway? But no matter…”

Oneironautical Histories

I befriend a fox. I give her a name. I cannot remember it. I skin her for fur and repent -- I weep. I give her to Mother to mount, but I tell her nothing: she cannot know I have killed, at least in part, for pleasure.

Peruvian sketch comedy spoofs terrorism before the government comes clean about it. A boy -- a brother of mine -- finds a scrap of the story on his tongue while diving in a lake.

We are drunk. M. Villa's party takes place at a library. I slouch -- then, a view from above. Every man has a red couch for himself. Some of them sip quietly. Nobody says a thing; we are to leave soon. We look at paintings. "Is this L. Gullo?" somebody asks. It is. I am proud, though I know him only through his art.

A race through the lake in the early morn. My love is partaking. I watch. People I know are there, but I cannot remember them. They set off and I turn my back. When it is done, somebody asks me, "Have you seen him?" I do not bother to look over. "He must be over there," I say. He has burdened his pockets with stones.

Tender Ghosts

These are the ones I love.

Alexandros o Megas

Gilles de Rais, butcher of boys

Alessandro Moreschi, Vatican pet

Antinous, Hadrian's Greek slave

Marlene Dietrich

Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria

Wilfred Owen and the seed of Europe

Percy Bysshe Shelley, brilliant soul

Violet and Daisy Hilton, joined at the hip

The fictional Patricia Braden

Alexander Pichushkin

Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite, love of my life, &c.

In Which They Behave Like Eight-Year-Olds

Erik arrived much later. Loud footfalls woke Richard – they were headed upstairs. Their direction was the room between the first guest room and the library, conveniently the one he’d picked to share between the two when Lottie got too nosy. The rookery, they called it, and it was mostly a secret. A place to be more violent, and one in which to lay low.

They had not visited it for a long time, at least not together. But Erik was up to something, he knew, what with the late nights and newer poisons. So Richard waited in the armchair by the window, dull in his senses, but not any less vicious, like an aging spider.

The door was forced with a kick, a screech of wood upon wood. Then, a man stumbled in.

Indeed it was him, albeit a drunken him, slump-shouldered, reeking of gin and sick like a workhouse boy. Perhaps that was why he suffered the mornings most of all? For the first time since taking Erik up, Richard experienced revulsion. Before, he would feel it with young girls, girls who’d love him all the more if he did not want them. Men and women alike who’d send him letters, petal-filled, peppered with kisses, which he’d toss unopened – sometimes ripped – into the fireplace.

It was helplessness that disgusted him. The shuffling of Erik’s feet rattled his nerves. Now he had backtracked and grabbed one end of the knob. It was broken. The other end clattered to the floor, to which he cursed in a language Richard could not place. Richard wasn’t sure whether it was even a tongue he knew – but the matter at hand was a different one, and he replaced the thought to the back of his mind.

Erik didn’t notice him until he shot the question, “Where have you been?”

In his surprise he stumbled, dropping a small cloth sack. It rolled to one side and back, and whined only afterwards; in it a creature lived, but barely. Erik cursed again, this time at someone in particular, “Fuck! You idiot!” But he did not look him in the face.

He gave the sack a kick. It rolled under the desk, where it resumed its agony. Then he sat, or rather slumped, in the chair opposite Richard. What a pathetic sight! He looked about to cry. As if that could have moved anyone!

He turned toward the window and said nothing.

Silence was his way of defiance, tonight.

Richard insisted. “Well?”

Nothing.

“You are drunk!”

“How English of you to hold that against me! To think you look continental enough!”

Each was now entrenched in his respective anger. Had a shared subject divided them, things would have been simpler: the words more poignant, the wound deeper, but easier to patch. It could have been a sentimental affair, had one cared more for the other’s opinion of him. Erik mistook Richard’s worry for morality. In his mind he turned him into a vicar, who, unhappy with repressing himself, did the same unto others. Saint Richard the Carpenter, the ascetic, the whipping- boy, the crying harlot. The worst of all, he appeared to preach.

Of course, this image was of his concoction. In reality, Richard was only jealous – jealous, disgusted and barely articulate. The insult shook him more than it should have, leaving his hands cold and his expression sombre. Though insignificant – it could apply to just about anyone – the tone and its source offended him. It was the first time Erik disrespected him, and it meant that until then he had been watching his step, shutting out the thoughts that, if voiced, would have torn him from his benefactor’s good graces.

Some falsehood is necessary for social niceties. The problem lies in telling how deeply it is rooted.

For the first time he noticed the sack. Inside was a small tortoiseshell kitten. The softness of its coat and the width of its haunches indicated it had been cared for, but it was rattled by fear. It even pissed itself when Richard took it out, leaving a dark stain on the carpet.

He dropped it in Erik’s lap.

“I brought him for you,” he answered the unsaid question. With that, he took the cat by the neck and shook it violently. Milk-teeth and claws cut deep into his fingers, but he seemed not to notice. To Richard’s horror, the act was an idle one. It seemed he didn’t even take pleasure in it, despite the energy expended in throttling. A new rigidity froze his limbs to the elbow, when he took a thumb to the windpipe, pursing his lips, brow a-quiver. The laziest of smiles signalled a shift in the eve’s logic, more so than the drunkenness, the fight, or the strangling. 

“What are you doing?”

Again he said nothing. The cat struggled with unnerving fierceness, but made not a sound, its fur stained with foreign blood, though it couldn't have known so.

“Stop at once. You can’t do this in front of me! Not in my –“

“Not in your house, I know.” There was a note of disappointment in his voice. Richard then realised there was not a chance he’d obey him. Promptly he turned his back – Erik tightened his grip and snapped the neck, taking his eyes from those frightened baby blues once they’d fully glazed over. “It’s not worth it, if you’re not watching. I brought him for you. You would’ve learned to skin and mount – I wanted to teach you.”

The carcass hit the wall across the room, a near miss to an idealised portrait of the third Baron.

Richard felt he had nothing to say.

Suddenly, Erik convulsed forward. Drink, bile and his last meal, a crumpet, exited his body without fair warning: out of the stomach, up the oesophagus, shooting from nostrils and mouth alike. It was too late to ask for a bucket, but it was still brought to him wordlessly. It was in preparation for times like these that Richard had placed one under the bed. What he’d predicted was nowhere near as dreadful as reality.

He couldn’t have described what he felt on the matter, had he wanted to.

But then again he was tired.

In all probability, somebody’s pet had been killed in front of him. There was nothing he could do about it, except deny all accusations, should anyone allude to Erik’s profession or temper or habits. People liked to point fingers at him, what with all those cats disappearing. For once they were correct, and it bothered him all the more for it.

Nothing reasonable had happened since he’d come home today. Especially not this tantrum. So he decided not to think about it, and he tried not to look at the vomit, which was thin with froth around the edges – what ghastly business! He’d spent enough nights with young stags to tell his friend had been eating very little as of late.

His shell having cracked, Erik dozed off very quickly. Richard undressed him and put him to bed. Afterwards he rung Lottie to clean up.

He Turns into a Child Butcher

It is said of the Baron Wellesley, one of our better heads of state, that as a child he was blamed for the death of his brother, and that this was, if not the sole, at least a principal cause for his various compulsions. This is only partly true. He did justify his behaviour with childhood tragedies, most of which he had read in books and adapted only later to fit the official histories.

The Baron Wellesley – or Richard, to those he liked – wrought the stories in gold, knowing that they would be unbelievable. He snipped off the edges, as some women do to their faces, and dabbed on the rouge like a Parisienne. None but a few thought his lying abnormal for a man of his station, who had lived in the continent and returned with a troupe of German performers, some of which stayed as his guests.

While there had been a younger Wellesley, named Bertrand and drowned in the bath aged two, nothing suggests that Richard was treated unfairly because of it. His widowed mother loathed him for other reasons, namely that she’d never wanted children at all. But she had married the son of an only son – a titled one at that! One without cousins or sisters or nephews, even an elderly uncle.

Rich in her own right, she had joined a dying house for the prestige, but nobody told her of the fates of those old families, and that the graves would keep on filling.

The cry of War rang clearly to Richard’s father, who had been raised on Homer, guilt, and patriotism. As a young man, enlisting was a duty to the King but more importantly to himself: he was to be a hero. He saw himself before a mirror, adjusting the medals on his chest to achieve the perfect glint. And this was to be due to his own successes. 

No more reaching into his wife’s purse, or beginning conversation with “You knew my father.” He would dine with well-known figures he’d have met in his own right. And he, like those men, would have played a part in history, and be not a flatterer but an equal.

The killing of youths had the least to do with it, in his mind. He was not cruel per se, merely careless: what was it to him if a mother was left childless? That was a problem for the powers, for whoever issued pensions. It could he God’s problem, for all he knew, if God still lived. It did not matter at all as long as some of them survived, themselves rewarded as he thought he would be; as long as England was triumphant and there were spoils to be divided.

He did not survive the year. His feats are unrecorded (did he do anything at all?); his body, cremated in a small French village that, if one were to believe the maps, does not exist.

His widow got the letter not a week before Christmas.