The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [5]
“He’s so young,” she says. “He wants a look at the city, that’s all. He’ll come back.”
“I know.”
“Eat, then.”
I let her put a bite of fish in my mouth. Oil, salt tang. I realize I’m hungry.
“You see?” she says.
There’s no name for this sickness, no diagnosis, no treatment mentioned in my father’s medical books. You could stand next to me and never guess my symptoms. Metaphor: I am afflicted by colours—grey, hot red, maw-black, gold. I can’t always see how to go on, how best to live with an affliction I can’t explain and can’t cure.
I let her put me to bed. I lie in the sheets she has warmed with stones from the hearth, listening to the surf-sounds of her undressing. “You took care of me today,” I say. My eyes are closed, but I can hear her shrug. “Making me ride. You didn’t want them laughing at me.”
Redness flares behind my closed eyelids; she’s brought a candle to the bedside.
“Not tonight,” I say.
Before we were married, I gave her many fine gifts: sheep, jewellery, perfume, pottery, excellent clothes. I taught her to read and write because I was besotted and wanted to give her something no lover had ever thought of before.
The next morning I see the note she’s left for me, the mouse-scratching I thought I heard as I slipped into sleep: warm, dry.
MY NEPHEW IS STILL sprawled on his couch when I pass through his room on my way to my audience. He’s drunk and has been fucked: face rosy and sweet, sleep deep, smell of flowers unpleasantly sweet. We’ll all want baths, later. Another grey day, with a bite in the air and rain pending. You wouldn’t know it was spring. My mood feels delicate but bearable; I’m walking along the cliff edge, but for the moment staying upright. I may go down to the city myself, later, to scrounge a memory, something drawn up from deep in the mind’s hole.
The palace seems to have rearranged itself during my long absence, like a snake might rearrange its coils. I recognize each door and hall but not the order of them, and looking for the throne room I walk into the indoor theatre instead. “Bitch,” someone is yelling. “Bitch!”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s yelling at me.
“Get out!”
My eyes adjust to the smoky dimness. I make out a few figures on the stage, and one very angry man climbing toward me over the rows of stone seats. A plume of white hair over a good face, a great face. Killing eyes. “Get out!”
I ask him what play they’re preparing.
“I’m working.” A vein throbs by his eye. He’s right up to me now, his breath in my face. He’s wrecked, he’s a killer.
I apologize. “I got lost. The throne room—?”
“I’ll take him.”
I look down at the boy who’s suddenly appeared at my side. The boy from the gates, the one I pretended not to recognize.
The director turns away and stalks back down to his position. “Places,” he barks.
“They’re doing the Bacchae,” the boy says. “We all love the Bacchae.”
Back in the hall he raises a hand and a soldier appears. The boy goes back into the theatre before I can thank him. The soldier leads me across another courtyard and through an anteroom with an elaborate mosaic floor, a lion hunt rendered in subtly shaded pebbles. It’s been a long time since I was here. The lion’s red yawn is pink now; the azure of a hunter’s terrified gaze has faded to bird’s-egg blue. I wonder where all the colour went, if it brushed off on the soles of a thousand shoes and got wiped across the kingdom. A guard holds a curtain aside for me.
“You refined piece of shit,” the king says. “You’ve spent too long in the East. Look at yourself, man.”
We embrace. As boys we played together, when Philip’s father was king and my father was the king’s physician. I was taller but Philip was tougher: so it remains. I’m conscious of the fine, light clothing I’ve changed into for this meeting, of the fashionable short clip of my hair, of my fingers gently splayed with rings. Philip