Free Boy Caesar by Jeremy Reed Page A

uncoil and the great force of it run with the sky on its back.
    The youths carrying him set off in good humour. Once again there were crowds lining the pavements, staring out with the flat faces of tourists confused by the difference between what they had anticipated and what they were actually seeing. Most of them appeared fazed by his pop-star appearance. He had the impression that he moved through the crowds like a hallucination. He was the purple and gold image responsible for distorting their visual field. Unable to contain him, he knew they would invent a language to describe him, and this in turn would have a knock-on effect in creating the legend he intended to become.
    They left the city centre with its congested traffic and negotiated a passage through a grid of bulky warehouses. There were workers everywhere shouldering sacks and crates, most of them stripped to the waist in the blond April sunlight. He could smell the fusion of spices and river sewage now, and it was direct in his face. The sensory input was raw and abrasive, and the information carried to his groin.
    He could hear stevedores shouting out instructions as theyunloaded a red-hulled cargo ship in from the East. He knew that the cargo would contain, amongst other things, spices, perfumes, dyes, slaves and thick black Indian hair used in the making of wigs. He was excited by the feeling of risk generated by being in the precinct. The maleness, the foreigners, the cutting-edge sense of danger, they all came together in his blood like a drug. Then there was the river, and his first proper sighting of its pythonic coils and muddy undertow dragged out of the hills. There was a wind frisking a blue finish to the mud-whisked surface. There were a number of ships moored to the nearside dock: big, alien and alarming as extraterrestrial visitors. They looked to him like craft arrived from the near planets as a prelude to a take-over. Gulls harassed the rigging and dived in hysterical forays for offal. He hadn’t heard or seen these birds before and was suspicious of their yellow-eyed aggression and their querulously guttural diction. They were like a mob without camaraderie as they fought over whatever
disjecta membra
the current turned up.
    Surveying the territory, he asked to be taken into a yard behind a restructured warehouse. After the continuous spotlight he had faced at the Senate, he felt the need to dissolve into shadows. He asked for only one minder to accompany him in his mapping out of sexual territory. He knew the madness and danger involved in such an enterprise but couldn’t help himself. He could be killed on the spot or subjected to humiliating ridicule by a gang of workers, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t cure himself of the habit, and that was his kick. He should have been back in the comfort and security of his quarters, instead of exploring the oily-dark underbelly of a dockside warehouse.
    He kept with a gold stripe of sunlight that advanced like a probe into the building. From where he stood he could make out the crouched figure of a docker sitting resting on top of a packing crate. The man seemed contracted into himself like a closed accordion. He could hear him breathing, his naked torso polished with sweat in the grainy dark. Even in the half-light he could see that the man was dark-skinned and perfectly proportioned.
    He continued going forward, the risk firing his heart, its beat soloud it was like amplified bass. The place was stocked with grain-sacks packed tight with their cereal contents. He was glad the light went in all the way to the interior. He had half a mind to turn back, before it was too late. He felt unable to breathe. His chest was knotted. The dark was suffocating, and for a moment he associated the laser-beam of sunlight with his own life-force. He had the terror that if one went out the other would follow.
    The man had sensed him now and was defensive of his territory. He was clearly skiving and frightened of