May was moving towards June. The weather changed for the better. It was warm and usually bright. Upstairs, I was told, I could/should open the small upper panels of the windows.
This was the time when regime change happened.
I had been obedient, subservient perhaps.
Each night I slept only a couple of hours. But I hadn’t slept well, had I, for fifteen, nearly twenty years.
He had never intruded, that I knew, on my slumber, despite the bedroom door’s being off, aside from that one striking time with the torch. Since that night I’d been very careful of him. Which is a crazy thing to say, of course. I was already careful of him. And it had done me no good.
And too I’d formerly taxed my brain, trying to find ways to outwit and deal with him, evict him. Destroy him.
I was hampered, naturally, by my authorial brain, which went too far. Frankly, my scenarios ended often in his maiming or death. They were fantasies. They were not possible to me. Either I am an indoctrinated pacifist, (my father, always think of others) or merely an utter coward – by which I mean, in this context, squeamish. I don’t boast of any truly moral wish to spare his life. I can’t lay claim to any saintly fastidiousness of that sort. But the end of the road was before me, and still I could think of nothing at all.
The wasp entered my life two days after I started to leave the upstairs windows open.
This had happened during other summers. Even given a notable dearth of insects constantly reported in the news, and put down to human vileness and global warming, intermittent moths, flies and wasps had always penetrated the house. Like, if not in the same spirit as my kindly mother, I tend to catch them all and put them back outside. Even wasps I spare until the autumn, when the damn things will perish anyway. I’d been stung sufficiently to know I wasn’t allergic to them. But also I was aware that, if they got into the mouth and stung, they would cause a swelling in the soft tissues and membranes which, closing the throat and airway, might result in death.
This wasp was obviously young and inexperienced. I caught it easily in the glass from the bathroom. Having caught it, I decanted it into a large empty jam jar I’d retained in my study to house spare biros. On top of the jar I placed a piece of card, pierced by me with air holes. Did they need to breathe? I had to assume so. Would it also need food? I dropped into the jar some crumbs from the breakfast toast I’d carried upstairs.
My wasp crawled about in the jar. buzzing in blind, automaton-like anger. Then settled on a bit of the toast. I stowed the jar in the bottom of the bedroom wardrobe. Perhaps the wasp would go to sleep. Perhaps it would die. I might find no opportunity to use it. I might let it go.
And if Sej discovered it? I’d say with the purest truth I did rescue them and then release them in summer. But, (now lying), this one had seemed comatose, so I’d given it crumbs and let it rest – and then unfortunately forgotten it.
One thinks sometimes, wrongly often, madmen will accept other madmen and their quite dissimilarly insane actions.
By this time I had been told by Sej both of his flat and its address in Saracen Road. The residence had come up once or twice in our communal post-dining phase, among the coffees, whisky and vodka. The 666 aspect of the number seemed never to strike him. He said little about the flat either, only that it wasn’t worth the money, but all right. Aside from being blighted by loud bad neighbouring music. He described the outside more than the inside, (including the glass panel in the door), and in fact said nothing I afterwards recalled of internal appearance. The small park he mentioned several times, the trees and shrubs. And why had he given me the actual address if not to point out its Satanic twist? “You’ll have to pay me a visit one day, Roy. Flat 6, top of 66, Saracen Road. It’s a big white terrace, or it used to be white, back when.”
And I said, “I should visit you?”
“Why not?”
“Won’t you still be here?”
And, “Oh, I might even be, Roy. You’re right.”
The day I caught the wasp and hid it, around eleven-thirty I went down to the kitchen, as during daylight hours I was seemingly allowed to, and through the library door I saw him asleep in the corner chair.
A book, not now one of mine but Milton’s Paradise Lost, lay open on his knee. Over by the power point in the corner, his steely slice of mobile rested on the floor, re-charging.
I froze in the hallway. I stared.
It didn’t seem impossible he might really have nodded off. He was young and would be able to fall asleep, and needed sleep more than I, no doubt. If he kept watch for me so much of every night, ready, playing Chopin or a Brahms Rhapsody on the piano, wasn’t it quite likely he might suddenly flake out with no warning?
But did he sleep? Did he?
His breathing had the sound of a sleeper’s. But things like that can be acted, and Sej, if he could do anything, was quite an accomplished actor.
There I hung from the thread of his tyranny, glaring in, transfixed, a stone.
And he opened his eyes without even any of the slightest sleeper’s momentary dislocation, and smiled.
“Hello, Roy. Making any tea? One for me, please.”
So I made the tea, and found my hands shaking so much I nearly did drop the bloody yellow and marigold cup. When I took it in I swallowed the regulation two gulps, and passed it to him.
“Sit down a minute, Roy.” I sat. “I’ve had an idea.”
Then he drank the tea. He didn’t say what the idea was, I waited. I waited while he drank all his tea.
Then he put the open book and the empty cup aside and stood up.
Going out ahead of me he called back lightly, “Come on. We’re going upstairs.”
I followed him. He climbed the stair. Docile, I climbed at his back. He had left the phone to recharge on the library floor. Had he forgotten? I decided not. It was another tease.
He preceded me into my study on this occasion. Neither had he ever done that before.
The whole surface of my skin was prickling. My eyes seemed stretched to the size, if not the square shape, of the hideous new saucers.
Something else that was new was about to happen, and I was to see it happen, be a part of it. It was like the smell of smoke, of burning, like the sick marzipan odour that still hung in the front room round the gutted TV.
My jacket and the two bags he wanted arranged in the middle of the room, by the desk.
He had suggested, (“I suggest, Roy”) that we both open them up now. He wanted to know, he said, if he’d guessed correctly what I had in each – aside from toiletries and clothes that I would have unpacked for use on my ‘return’.
I unloaded the jacket first. There was no sense in evasion. He’d been right on everything there, almost. He hadn’t itemised, however, the house deeds. He was quite impressed by my having included those. “Are these copies? They look like the originals. Well done, Roy. Your parents must have paid off their mortgage. Those were the days.”
“Yes,” I said.
Then we did the bags, and it was all as he had said, aside from one or two things that he joked about, as if I had entertainingly put over a clever trick on him. “You weren’t taking any chances were you, old sport?” Reminding me, as before by his abrupt use of this antiquated expression, of the eponym of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. The DNA samples, including the fork, seemed to fox him a moment. After that he realised and laughed. “Not bad. Not bad.” Eventually he opened the small box and pulled off the bubble wrap. “I’d wondered where it had gone. Your parents’, right?”
“Yes.”
“Lovely.” He stood caressing my mother’s red glass dog tenderly and I wanted to snatch it. I wanted, as now I did so often, to kill him. Impotently and despairingly, need I say.
Carefully he placed the dog on my desk.
Not once had he glanced up at the writing on the ceiling.
“Well,” he said, “that’s that then, all cleared up. Got anything else hidden, Roy? Anything you want to confess to?”
I stared at him, blanking from my wide eyes and mind the glass of wasp in the bedroom wardrobe.
“Well,” he said again. “Then I think it’s time for your bath.”
Even I, even then, even like that, did a kind of physical double-take. “What?”
“Your bath.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yeah. I know you’re a nice hygienic guy. Clean shaven, all but that cobweb arrangement on your head. Teeth your own and all flossed and brushed, the rest showered, ready to face the world. But I think today, take an early bath. Or a shower, if you prefer.”
I said, hollow and estranged, knowing it was not so simple, “If you say so.”
“Yes, Roy. That’s it.”
I half turned.
“No, no, sorry, Roy, should have explained. We’ll see to the water in a minute. Just take your stuff off.”
“My – stuff.”
“Clothes, Roy. Shirt, pants, your Y-fronts or whatever you favour. Shoes and socks.”
The shock this time came externally from far away and wrapped around me as if I were something dead that could not feel.
I didn’t move. My brain had nothing inside it but rushing and white noise.
“Oh,” he said. Contrite, he lifted one hand. “Again, mea culpa. I should have made it clear. This isn’t sexual. You have nothing to fear, that way.”
I didn’t move.
“Oh, come on, Roy. Do you want me to help?”
I must have backed a step. The filing cabinet tapped my spine.
“Yes, OK,” he said, reasonably, “why am I telling you to do this. Because it has to be faced, Roy,” (Oh Christ, shades of my father), “it just has to be dealt with, here and now. Clothes off. All and everything. Or I will help, Roy,” His voice was quiet and a faint hint of worry was in his expression – not yet quite the upset and concern that had heralded the blow. But enough.
“Give me a minute,” I said.
“Sure. I’ll time you.” And he started, at an exact pace, softly aloud to count off the seconds.
My mind sent me a message that he was checking to make sure I had nothing ‘concealed on my person’. My mind was trying, apparently, to make sense of what was either senseless or had another meaning it refused to confront – to face up to.
I knew, despite the business with bags and jacket, that Sej wasn’t checking for anything concealed. Unless it was my concealed flesh. My body.
And no, it wasn’t sexual.
At school, when the showers had been installed for use after games, (games – the misnomer of all time, nothing playful about them), one or two things had gone on here and there. I have no problem at all with homosexuality, so long as I’m not expected to join in. To me, even when presented in the best of literature, it seems silly, a sort of invention. I’ve no doubt this is a flaw in my intelligence – not of course that I find myself ‘straight’ as they say, but to be incapable of grasping others may find non-straightness not only the only option, but enjoyable. Or maybe even, as a boy of my own age, then about sixteen, once coaxingly said to me, my alienation is my defence against finding out my true feelings. Most if not all men are supposedly quite adaptable to enthusiastic sexual acts with their own gender. Generally however, at school or elsewhere, I’ve seldom been propositioned. Nevertheless I seemed to know enough to believe that he, Joseph Traskul Sej, had no inclination or interest that way. And at the same moment a burning dominance radiated from him. There was no route out of this. As with everything else, I’d better give in.
It goes without saying, I’ve had to strip in front of strangers before, once or twice in tense and difficult situations, as when I’d had a cancer scare two and a half years previously.
I didn’t wait until he reached sixty in his counting.
Off came everything, as he had stipulated, watch and shoes first. I hung the shirt and pants lightly over the back of the desk chair, left the rest on the floor.
He sat in silence, watching me.
I didn’t glance at him.
When everything was off I stood there by the desk, looking out of the window. And he got up, and came and looked me over, front and back, at a distance of about four to six feet.
During this he said nothing. Neither did I. It took about five minutes.
“OK,” he said, “let’s run the bath, shall we?”
Now I was to walk first. I went into the bathroom and realised I did not want to bend over in front of him to put the plug in the tub. Something so trivial. And curious, too, if I felt – and I didn’t – no sexual threat. Yet threat of course I did feel. I simply couldn’t codify it. It wasn’t that I was merely embarrassed. I was not embarrassed. While my body has little to recommend it neither am I deformed or spectacularly scarred. I’ve been neither blessed nor cursed in any physical area. I am a short skinny man, generally average, nondescript.
Having no choice anyway, I leant forward and shoved in the plug, then turned on both taps.
He meanwhile walked past me and letting it down, sat on the closed seat of the lavatory. He kept on watching, observing.
Then he said, “You were circumcised.”
That sent another jolt through me. Not the reference, just the impact of his quiet, flat tone.
Again I said nothing and he added, “It’s routine in some hospitals. Evidently the one where you were born, as I don’t think you’re Semitic.” When I didn’t speak now he added “Or are you?”
So I must answer.
“I haven’t a clue. My parents weren’t.”
“You’re a bit underweight,” he went on, as if musing, “gut a bit flabby. Nothing much.” The bath was full; I turned off the taps. “Get in, then,” he said.
I got in. I sat down when he gestured to me to sit, in the warm water.
“Well,” he said, “just carry on.”
“What am I supposed to carry on with?” I said.
“Your bath. Just do what you always do.” He paused and then said, in the most indescribable, vaguely humorous, terrible way, “Don’t mind me.”
In prisons of war or kidnap, guarded by jailors indifferent, sadistic or murderous, men have had to do this. They have had to urinate and defecate and vomit, also under the keen eyes of these enemies. Would that be the next step?
The soap was in my hands. I began to wash.
Still I hadn’t once looked into his face, let alone his eyes. Not looking at him, even though he never took his eyes from me, seemed peculiarly to leave me a measure of privacy, perhaps safety. This is irrational, and afterwards became meaningless.
With each ordinary everyday move I made, I wondered what would come after.
He said nothing for a while.
He watched.
When I’d performed these ablutions, sluiced myself over, then he said, “Don’t you ever lie back for a minute in the water?”
“Not often.”
“So that’s all.”
I thought, He is going to instruct me now to do something else. To play with myself, perhaps. Or to sing a song. Am I going to do that? Either of those? I suppose I’ll have to.
I stared at the light shining on the chrome taps. They weren’t very clean. Franziska hadn’t done a very good job, but to be fair too, that had been weeks back because he’d made me cancel her visits. The agency were very understanding about the emergency journey abroad he’d told me to say I had to make. I could have rung another number, pretended, let her arrive. But what would she have done anyway? Besides, I’d imagined him telling her he was my son, and how deranged I was, she’d been lucky. Even playing the piano to her, asking her for a date, God knows.
“Well, Roy,” he said, breaking in on these random thoughts, “the water will be getting cold. Better get out now.”
When I was out again I reached for the towel, but before I got hold of it he said, “Now leave the towel. First I want you, just for a minute, to stand there and look me in the face.”
It wasn’t chilly in the bathroom. It was nearly June and the sun was out.
I raised my head and looked directly at him.
Only I couldn’t. Somehow I couldn’t. My eyes slid off his face. I tried to make them stay – less for any affirmative reason of my own, than in order to obey and so appease him. And I couldn’t. My eyes began to water. This was not fear, or tearfulness. It was the strain, as if I forced myself to stare into the sun, or hold up some huge weight that was going to break my back.
“OK,” he said then. With the edge of vision I saw he smiled his smile. He threw the towel to me. And walked past me and out of the bathroom.
I heard him go down the stairs.
What happened next surprised me. I pushed the door shut and locked it, then I lifted the lid of the lavatory and was sick. The bath was still gurgling as it emptied. Perhaps he didn’t hear the noise of my nausea.
I stayed in the bathroom after this for some time.
I believed, even if he’d heard nothing, even if he came to ‘check’ on me again and I made some excuse as to why I was still there – cleaning the bath perhaps – even so he guessed, had calculated and foretold how I was.
I advised myself I had been very afraid that something frightening, a thorough assault, a beating, was about to be perpetrated on me. Even after all male rape. But I knew I hadn’t thought that. And I had been convinced also that so long as I did as I was asked, there’d be no violence. My subsequent physical reaction, and my mental one still, were not caused by actual anxiety or terror. It was something else.
On the floor by the basin I sat on the damp towel, thinking, thinking of this. Thinking of how I had been naked.
It was a very minor ordeal. Nothing dramatic or ghastly had occurred. It amounted to nothing.
But my brain held it. As in dreams sometimes I do, I saw myself as a separate person, and viewed from above. I saw myself standing before him, then in the bath washing, getting out and standing again in front of Joseph Traskul, unable to meet his eyes, unable to look at him. I knew that once more clothed, I would remain unable to look into his face.
I found too I didn’t want to leave the bathroom. I wished to stay there, by the basin, seated on the floor, not focussing, staring inward, thinking about myself seen from above as another person, naked. Or rather, this was not what I wished. It was all I could do. Even to move my left leg, the foot of which had gone to sleep, was beyond me. My mind was filling the room, and the house outside, with a kind of cerebral fog. In this Sej vanished. He would not therefore come up to the bathroom, knock, break down the door. Nothing would happen. Time had stopped.