On Loving Josiah (27 page)

‘I don’t think it’s been a curse. Crowds are dangerous. They all believe the same thing. That’s spooky.’

‘Believing different things doesn’t make us any happier.’

‘But you’re a truth-seeker, Tom. What has happiness got to do with anything?’

‘I’m happy now,’ said Thomas, seriously. ‘I’d say, quite a lot.’

They entered through the great medieval door of the Duomo della Santa Maria dell’Assunto, as sure in each other’s love as a bride and bridegroom, and for a boy who had never even seen inside a church the effect was mesmeric. Josiah was to say that it didn’t feel like being in a building at all, there was no sense of prosaic things like walls, floors and ceilings; it was rather like being inside a jewel, where every surface had been cut with only beauty in mind, or perhaps heaven, or perhaps this was the place where the two became one.

‘Marmor lapis deorum est,
’ said Thomas, because nowadays the two had taken to speaking in Latin when the spirit moved them.

‘Vere dicis,
’ replied his companion.

And if marble is the stone of the gods, not only was the floor paved in it but every wall and column was carved in stripes of black and white, ascending high into the ethereal hexagonal dome, as though it were a work of nature rather than art: and the very highest point of it was studded with stars. Josiah, being only a boy, lay under that dome on the marble without a thought in the world, and because his expression was one of awe rather than mischief, no one disturbed him.

The following days they were more observers of the particular: Pisano’s pulpit, with its seven panels depicting scenes from the life of Christ; the frescoes in the Chapel of St John the Baptist, the plaster busts of a hundred and seventy popes made in 1570, and the third century Roman copy of the
Three Graces
in the Libreria Piccolomini, and a hundred other things which enchanted the pair hugely. But perhaps these two felt at their most intimate poring over the
illuminated
anthems of the fifteenth century, written in Latin, of course, which instinctively made them feel, somehow, conspiratorial: for these songs of praise were written in
their
language, and lived only for them.

The Duomo led them to the Basilica, and St Catherine of Siena’s head, stolen by her adorers in 1380 from Rome and smuggled here in a bag along with one of her hands. So her body with one hand was buried in Rome; while her head was mummified along with the other hand in Siena. Which city had the greater prize? St Catherine herself would argue that neither did, that the body should be
mortified
to reveal the spirit within it, and if it wasn’t actively being
flagellated
by her religious order – both by friars and her fellow sisters – it should at least be being starved.

‘She was mad,’ insisted Josiah, peering through a thick glass
window to survey the thick leathery hide of St Catherine’s sunken cheeks.

‘She was also charming, apparently. Everyone loved her. And the greater and more acute her physical pain, the greater her spiritual exultation and the closer she felt to Jesus. She had visions lasting three months. And then she would emerge and help the sick and the dying – she was fearless, death was nothing to her. Yet she wasn’t mad. Far from it: she was quite at home in the world of church
politics
and reform, and impressed every Pope who met her. Even on her death bed she was issuing instructions on some aspect of
reunification
. Denying the fleshly demands of the body was considered part and parcel of the life of any Christian. St Catherine dedicated her virginity to Christ when she was only seven.’

‘How did she know what virginity was at that age?’

‘She was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children in a dyer’s family. Perhaps she’d overheard her mother nagging her father to keep his hands off her. She would probably have shared a bedroom with them.’

‘So what would St Catherine say to me?’ asked Josiah, guilelessly. ‘About desire.’

‘I don’t get you,’ said Thomas, less guilelessly.

‘According to our biology teacher, it’s natural for adolescent boys to think about sex almost constantly.’

‘Do you? I don’t think you do, do you?’

‘Sometimes I feel like an industrial electrical cable which has been cut down, and there’s a vast current running through me which doesn’t know where to go.’

Thomas’ lips puckered responsibly. ‘I think St Catherine would tell you to fast.’

Josiah looked disappointed.

‘The last time I was here you could buy replicas of St Catherine’s scourge in the gift shop. Perhaps I should whip you mercilessly.’

‘I should like that,’ said Josiah.

Thomas couldn’t tell if he was joking. He stood back a foot to survey Josiah’s beauty. ‘You’re not serious!’

‘I think I see the point of a sound whipping,’ said Josiah, flirtatiously.

‘Which is?’

‘If you’re in pain, it’s as if you don’t exist anymore. You can’t plot and plan, you can’t say one thing and be another. It’s too
complicated
. You’re literally, beside yourself in pain. Doesn’t “ecstasy” mean, “standing outside yourself?” The thing about pain, is that you’re set free from being you, and sometimes being you is the greater pain.’

‘How did you manage to get there, Josiah, at your tender age?’

‘Aha, Tom, I still have secrets.’

‘As I have from you,’ said Thomas, aware of sounding childishly competitive.

‘I bet you never had your parents disappear into thin air one day, boom!’ Josiah clapped his hands, like a conjuror. ‘You’ve never had to ask, day after day, year after year, “Where are they?” to the only wankers who could possibly help you, and who barely seem to notice you’ve asked a question.’ Josiah was shouting, gesticulating. People were beginning to stare. Thomas put a finger to his mouth and pleaded, ‘Shh.’

The boy obliged. He spoke so quietly Thomas could barely hear him. ‘Sometimes I just want to lose myself. I just want not to exist.’

Thomas’s every instinct was to hug the boy, but they were in the Basilica, the large, empty public space which invited God’s
presence
, not human intimacy. So Thomas patted him – oh a pat isn’t very good when you wish to be taken up in someone’s arms! – and he said, ‘At least you have your father now!’ But these words failed equally miserably; Josiah looked at him as if he was some alien who could never understand him, and he said, ‘You call Gibson a father?’

Thomas took Josiah out of the Basilica, and out of Siena, and
they didn’t go back there for a week; the bus left too early, and there was too much lying together to be done. If truth be told, half a single bed would have been ample for them, and in the morning they watched the sun rise in their own chapel, the red, musky glow giving way to a white sharp light. Thomas kissed the boy’s hair, often and happily; Josiah held onto Thomas’ hand under the blankets as tightly as Michaelangelo’s Adam had yearned to take the hand of his God. Then, at eight in the morning, with Josiah lying in the crook of his arm, Thomas said, ‘I think Plato was wrong to be so dismissive of shadows.’

‘I didn’t know that he had been,’ said Josiah.

‘Then I shall tell you the allegory of the cave,’ said Thomas, momentarily turning towards his pupil to kiss him on his temple. ‘Plato believed that human beings were like men living in a cave, who never even suspected the existence of another realm of sunlight, and who mistook shadows for real objects.’

‘How’s that possible?’

‘It’s quite elaborate, as far as I remember. They’re held prisoner, they can’t move their heads from left to right, there’s a fire at the back of the cave and a low wall somewhere in the middle of it, behind which people crawl up and down holding up a range of objects whose shadows are reflected on the wall of the cave – so that’s all the prisoners are capable of seeing, that’s their sum reality and they don’t question it.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Josiah.

‘Perhaps there’s another, truer reality out there which we can’t grasp. Some would say, if you can’t grasp it, it can’t exist. They used to call themselves “logical positivists”.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘Pure arrogance. There are minds in Cambridge, for example, which think in lines so rigid they even manage to reduce infinity to a man-made proposition, useful in mathematics but otherwise
defunct. And they have no conception of a truth which is not pure logic, with its meaningless dependence on Aristotelian syllogisms. If all boxes are red, and x is a box, then x is red, that sort of thing. And if your mind is full of that, where do you go next?’

‘To a deep pool somewhere?’ ventured Josiah, only half-listening.

‘You’re right! Down to your very bones, you’re right!’ Thomas was impressed, and kissed Josiah on the top of his head. ‘We humans find simplicity hard going,’ he said. ‘But you’re right, we should give it a go.’

So out came the large-scale map; out came the red pen to draw over footpaths they might take and pools they might swim in; out came the trunks (last worn, in Thomas’s case, six years previously) and out came (and Thomas remembered the slight unease he felt both in buying and packing it) the suntan lotion. Josiah,
meanwhile
, had deliberately forgotten to bring his own school swimming trunks, imagining he would rather be naked if push came to shove; but strange to say, the more intimate these two became, the more aware they were of the feelings of the other, and Josiah knew that his nakedness alarmed Thomas and he kept it to himself. Inevitably they lay on the bank in the heat of the day, and yes, they did massage the cream into each other’s backs: Thomas on Josiah – perfunctorily, and to the point; Josiah on Thomas – with a little more feeling, a little more awareness of the contours of his back, for this was the first skin he’d been let loose on. They also sat in dappled shade, reading and eating gorgonzola, and Josiah took Thomas’s fingers into his mouth and licked them clean, and so easy were they with each other, that Thomas laughed, even in his heart.

‘What does sex feel like, Tom? What does it feel like to have sex with a woman?’ Josiah asked late one afternoon. The pair had been swimming all morning in a deep pool about seven miles from their chapel. The water was a pale verdigris; Thomas said that was
probably
because of the high copper content in the soil (Thomas knew 
everything). Then they’d both fallen fast asleep, lying outstretched by the water, and Josiah had been dreaming erotic dreams that he was trying to place.

Thomas considered. ‘It feels secret and dangerous. It’s good.’

‘You said once that you said it disappointed you.’

‘Did I? I meant, I think, not the physical experience itself, which is pleasant, Josiah. The experience as a whole is difficult to get right.’

‘I want to know about the physical experience. I want to know what it feels like to be inside a woman. Can you describe it?’

‘Of course you’ve felt… sexually aroused?’

‘Oh yes. But by what? By Woman? By Man? What I feel barely has an object. Or at least, everything is its object. If that poplar over there came to life I would desire that tree.’

‘I was thinking myself what a handsome tree that poplar is.’

‘Do you think desire can just be free-floating?’

‘I do, I think you’re right. I think it can have any object at all. The desire for God, knowledge, beauty, the desire for possession, the desire to hold onto someone, or something – doesn’t desire give us the illusion, at least, that our lives have meaning? Doesn’t desire have a necessary journey built within it: here I am, and there I wish to be? Isn’t that feeling the very core of what makes life worthwhile?’

‘I desire you,’ said Josiah quietly, sweetly; Thomas took his hand and kissed it, but was keen to turn desire into something noble.

‘I’ve often wondered whether to introduce you to Plato’s
Symposium
. Socrates suggests that all desire is ultimately the desire for Beauty Itself, the Platonic Form of Beauty – we talked about Plato’s Forms the other day, they inhabit the realm beyond the shadows. Do you remember the cave allegory?’

‘I don’t desire you because you’re beautiful, Tom.’

Thomas ignored the look Josiah gave him, and launched forth into a further salutary lesson.

‘My point exactly! I’ve often thought there are two kinds of desire,
one with a small d and one with a capital D. The small d is barely worth discussing. It’s about good health. It’s about fitness to
procreate
. It’s about evolutionary biology.’

‘What if you’re homosexual? What if you desire someone of your own sex?’

‘Are you looking for a merely physical experience?’

‘You mean, do I desire with a small “d”?’

‘Yes, do you?’

Josiah said seriously, ‘I do want a physical experience.’

‘But as part of something bigger, surely?’

‘Not necessarily.’ But when Thomas looked crestfallen, he added, tactfully, ‘So tell me about desire with a big D.’

‘You make it sound ridiculous.’

‘Or desire with a big P.’

‘Josiah!’

‘Come here, Tom.’

‘No, no I won’t.’

‘Then I shall come to you.’

Josiah rolled over and lay his hand over Thomas’ stomach,
spreading
out his fingers over the dark hair above his swimming trunks.

‘You’ve caught the sun,’ Josiah said, ‘You’re looking good.’

And with that Josiah tentatively moved his fingers under the elastic of the trunks.

‘You’ve got an erection,’ he said.

Thomas pushed him away and snapped, ‘Get off me, you idiot.’