Echo Cycle E-Book

Patrick Edwards

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Gladiator meets 1984 in this near-future thriller featuring timeslips, ancient magic and a disturbingly plausible dystopian Britain...68 CEFleeing disaster, young Winston Monk wakes to find himself trapped in the past, imprisoned by the mad Emperor Nero. The Roman civilization he idolized is anything but civilized, and his escape from a barbaric home has led him somewhere far more dangerous.2070 CEAs the European Union crumbled, Britain closed its borders, believing they were stronger alone. After decades of hardship, British envoy Lindon Banks joins a diplomatic team to rebuild bridges with the hypermodern European Confederacy. But in Rome, Banks discovers his childhood friend who disappeared without a trace. Monk appears to have spent the last two decades living rough, but he tells a different story: a tale of Caesars, slavery and something altogether more sinister.Monk's mysterious emergence sparks the tinderbox of diplomatic relations between Britain and the Confederacy, controlled by shadowy players with links back to the ancient world itself...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also available from Patrick Ewards and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Before

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

After

And then…

A word about making things up…

Acknowledgements

About the author

ECHO CYCLE

Also available from Patrick Ewards and Titan Books

Ruin’s Wake

ECHOCYCLE

PATRICK EDWARDS

TITAN BOOKS

Echo Cycle

Print edition ISBN: 9781785658815

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658822

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2020 Patrick Edwards

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Aurelia

Before

The day I went missing. That’s where I’ll start. Keep up.

Remember that flight into Rome? I do. It stank of peanuts and old farts. I was relieved when we touched down at Ciampino that I was the first off. Easter was his predictable self, yelling ‘Monk’s going to puke!’, his idiot coterie guffawing along. I wasn’t sick from the flight (I was just pale back then) but I had a dry mouth and Italy was outside. The terminal was dusty in the corners where no one had bothered to sweep it up and the ceiling tiles were browned and cracked. Every one of the dozen automatic gates was out of order, so we were stuck with the resentful eyes of a bored border guard, contemptuous as he flicked his eyes from my passport to me, then back again. Stupid hat like a gabled roof, but I kept my opinions out of my face because I didn’t want my first day in the Eternal City to be in an immigration holding room. He looked to be the touchy kind.

Did your father ever question why a rich school spent so little on its boys? Mine would have put it down to making us strong. He was full of shit. We didn’t even get the good flights that went to the new airport where things worked. No wonder the guard looked so pissed off.

The baggage carousel sat still for what felt like an hour underneath a faded poster declaring Benvenuti a Roma, the Divine Augustus looking like he’d rather be standing anywhere else; two thousand years of majesty and gravitas undone by a half-arsed tourist-board committee from before the Confederacy.

It’s not there anymore, Ciampino Airport. A relic of the old times, the whole lot of it from terminal to airstrip went the way of the bulldozer. But you already know that, don’t you?

The carousel started up like it was being tortured. Bags were birthed through the flapping rubber strips in flurries, the baggage handlers no doubt going for a smoke between each load. Mine was almost the last which, of course, Easter and his crew found hilarious; it caught on some stray edge as I tried to haul it off, just as I stepped in a puddle of Coke or orange juice or piss, and before I knew it I was on my backside with my case half on top of me. The morons hooted like they’d blow the tops off their heads and I wished, lusted, for a magic red button that would make them cease to be.

The coach sped us from the airport at breakneck pace, the driver (bald on top, forearms of a gorilla) carving in and out of traffic, impervious to honks from other vehicles. He gave as good as he got, Italian swearing drifting over the musty seatbacks with their gum-crusted ex-ashtrays. The jerks and veers had my stomach roiling and I just wished I could get out and walk.

Not even a view, I thought, a wonderland of antiquity hidden behind flyover-underpass concrete sides. I could have been on any highway, anywhere in the world. I resolved to play a game, fixing my gaze on the outside and not allowing my eyes to budge, prohibiting them from following anything as we sped along. The concrete and metal became a monochrome blur.

A flash of brightness, like a gap in dentures. Another.

Openness.

The city stretched out and I saw vaulted roofs, higgledy-piggledy tower blocks crushed together in clumps, dotted in between soaring facades, encolumned and engraved. Beyond, in the far distance, the skeletons of huge towers and the cranes building them stood in silhouette against a sky of dull, weak gold that illuminated but seemed to touch nothing. The vista was a postcard, a scale model, but I was electrified. This was where the great men of the world walked.

Something hit me on the back of the head.

Scrunched-up paper from a magazine, its glossed surface scarred by creases. In the back row, Easter and his fellow twats had adopted a thick silence, doing a terrible job of not gurning; a piggy one, Baden-Moncrief, I think, let out a snort.

Easter caught my eye. ‘What?’ he cried, all mock outrage on the inflection.

On cue the others dissolved into fits. I had a flash of a fantasy: me, a claw hammer and the balls to use it. It passed; I was an angry boy but worrying about my future made me meek.

I knew the dance well: the charade was what he wanted, the play-act of it all that would get me flustered and wrong-footed. Not today, I thought, not here. Before the no-I-didn’ts and the shut-up-you-fucking-nerds could even get warmed up, I moved several rows forwards, hopefully out of range. On the way I passed Miliband Best – short, dull of eye and cursed with the only Lefty parents in the whole school. Another outcast (not that it was a club or anything – it was every man for themselves) and an unfortunate creature: bad at Games, didn’t play an instrument and, to boot, thick as pig shit. He’d been the only one in the year to take a paper that covered all three sciences in one and barely scraped that; Daddy was an Old Boy with a chequebook, so Quintus made it back in to the Lower Sixth but I bet he wished he hadn’t.

I remember thinking: At least I know I’m clever; what does that poor fucker have? I know. We’re all wankers when we’re young, and me more than most.

The vacant seat next to him was emptiness given mass. I mean, calling a child Miliband in that day and age, when things were already turning sour and lonely for anyone without an Albion Party membership. Not a snowball’s chance.

The unlucky Millie was, by my forward move, made next in line to bear the brunt of the back row’s ‘games’ – you remember that the law of our jungle was that someone had to occupy the last rung on the shitty pyramid. I earned a look that said Thanks, dick and I tried to look apologetic, but I think my face just came out looking shifty.

I dumped myself into an empty pair of seats and pressed my nose against the glass. Outside, the city had fled again.

* * *

True to form, the boarding house was a rickety, vertical refuse pile – I think you said something about it being little better than our dorms back at school. That narrow trench of street, where the sky was a pale slit; we were ushered through a set of gates, up a cracked driveway almost entirely plugged by an ancient van, then through a set of double doors. The round-shouldered woman with a wild nest of hair and triangular glasses perched atop her hook nose cast baleful looks at us as we trooped past.

My room, it was announced, was on the second floor. I was to share it with five others. Like we’re back in the third-form dorms for fuck’s sake, I remember thinking.

By the time I reached the landing my breath burned in my chest and my bag was pulling my shoulder out of joint – I wasn’t sound of body in those days. Through a slit window I gazed down through the empty well of space at the core of the building; each floor was its own stratum, concrete and brick mixed with not even an eye on continuity. Before I could consider it, I was shoved in the back, my name tossed at me like a swearword.

In the dorm room a single window looked out on grey concrete. My bed was creaky and lumpy. Even as I dropped my bag, from behind me came a sound of pure, manifest revulsion. Easter had a look on his face that said he’d been dealt the most monstrous injustice, being put in with us losers: me, Fatty Lamb, Quintus Best, your good self and one of the Thai Bobs. I was just glad that I wasn’t the outnumbered one for once.

‘This is a bloody outrage,’ he said, all nostrils. ‘You’d better keep your hands to yourself, Monk.’ He made a limp wrist at me, then shooed Fatty off the bed the furthest away from me. When he hesitated, the poor lad received a thump on his fleshy arm for good measure and he went to claim another bed, mumbling threats we all knew he’d never carry out.

I slid my suitcase under the bed, avoiding Easter’s eye, remembering the fifth form when we got our own rooms and his had been next door. Waking in the dark, early one morning, seeing the outline of him next to my bed, his dick in his hand. I never told you, and I never bothered to tell the Chaplain; the dead look on his face scared the shit out of me and he was alone – this wasn’t some prank. I threw a lamp at him, and we all know what happened next. I was the one who’d snuck into his room. I was the mucky little bender. It had always been bad, but it got worse after that.

As the room went quiet save for the sound of boys unpacking, I knew the others were worried about stray hands in the night, and they weren’t thinking about mine.

* * *

Rome. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself headlong into it: oldest of places, nexus of life and learning and war and death and art. I’d dreamed of it for years and years at the back of dusty classrooms as dullards and cretins with an eye on nothing but Daddy’s business leaned back in their chairs, while equally bored masters droned out the life and times of the Gracchi or the bleating of M.T. Cicero. I’d been somewhere else. I’d been here. I soaked up every story I could, every book in the library. Soldiers, butchers, emperors and slaves; I’d breathed in Rome and exhaled Rome, carving its streets and palaces and theatres into my mind, building its topography from pictures in worn textbooks, sculpting the contours from the words of Ovid and Catullus. History was not history here, at least it wasn’t for me. It was – is – the living, beating heart of pasts that refused to die. And here I was.

Well, not exactly. We were on the road again before long.

Doing their level best to cram as much into the time we had, our caretaker teachers had booked the trip to Pompeii that very day, with the smell of the airline barely gone from our nostrils. We were a hungry and truculent bunch by now (though I recall you’d managed to snaffle a chocolate bar from somewhere, which you shared) and Mr Oswald and Miss Boniface had given up on trying to sell the trip to us; I could see them dreading the long drive as much as we were. Two hundred and forty minutes on winding roads that all led away from the city instead of towards it.

Oswald, who had me for Latin, had been confused by my sour expression when I got back on the coach. Likely, he’d expected me to be champing to get to a few ruins but I had other things on my mind, like being tired and pissed off by Easter who’d already started holding court in our room and making it unbearable. I hadn’t wanted to bring it up because, as Father always said, ‘No one likes a moaner,’ so I didn’t.

‘Why so glum, Monk?’ he’d asked. He’d just had a cigarette and was chipper. ‘Thought you’d be made up.’

‘I am, sir.’ Flat.

‘Well, you don’t look it. Best-preserved site in the country, Monk! All sorts, just lying around as they went. You’ll see, it’ll be great!’

‘Yes, sir,’ I intoned and he lost patience with me, waving me on.

I was being a sour little fucker, I can’t deny. There was plenty to look forward to on the other side of that long drive. What’s not to like about a town that got swallowed by a volcano? Women clutching babies, houses with intact plumbing, all of that shit. If I put my mind to it, I decided after the first hour, the bones of this provincial town could give me a flavour of life in Caesar’s Rome, though it could never – in my adolescent mind – live up to the big shebang. Rome, you see, still had a beating heart and it was that I longed to see.

Gods, the bliss of ignorance.

I managed to get some shut-eye and came to when I felt the vibration of the coach change underneath me. We’d pulled into a wide parking lot where we disembarked, most of the others showing the bleary eyes of sleep barely snatched. A little café crowded one end of the open area with white plastic tables and faded blue Orangina umbrellas. A squat, marbled building was at the other end. Above the entryway, a sign greeted us in Italian, English, German, Japanese and – a sign of the change that was already happening in Europe – Latin. It proclaimed the entrance to the ancient city of Pompeii just through the automatic glass doors. A few other tourists mooched about under spindly trees and the sun beat down, wringing sweat from our pores. I was still dressed for England in worsted trousers and though I’d left my blazer back in Rome my back felt moist all the way down to the crack of my arse.

Oswald and Boniface marshalled us. I saw shelves of trinkets and glass-topped counters through the doors and heard the thrum of air con. To enter this wondrous jewel of the ancient world, we had first to pass through the gift shop.

* * *

We had ten minutes to ourselves when the coach dropped us back in Rome before dinner. Most of the boys filtered into the boarding house to crash on beds and unpack, but I went searching for coffee. My feet were sore and my neck was burnt – I always thought I could get away with it until the continental sun reminded my Anglo-Saxon skin otherwise.

I’d seen the ‘bodies’, of course, in their death poses, put on show for us tourists. They looked just like people who lay down for a sleep, but I couldn’t feel sorrow or revulsion or shock. No matter how much I stared at them – just a pane of glass between my face and the lumpy ruin of theirs – knowing this was the very pose of a person who died in fear, I couldn’t attach humanity to it: they were the sediment deposits in a chunk of cooled lava where a life had been. The life itself was nothing now. Easter and his idiots went in for selfies, loving the transgression, but it only made them look bigger idiots: geology had had its fun and these humanoid shapes were beyond mockery now. They might as well have taken the piss out of a mountain.

Ahh, but the other stuff got me, though. Little things, real signs of life like a restored mosaic floor or segments of wall still ochre with paint that had lasted the long, buried centuries. Stepping stones across deep-set roads. At one point I found what could only have been a tavern, with an actual bar and slots for amphorae and I think I got a little choked up. I didn’t show it, old boy, but I did have a soul.

Most of the city was reserved for academics, leaving juicy titbits to get the tourists in – the odd temple, a bathhouse, assorted courtyards where the columns had been levered upright, Corinthian leaf still standing proud. The whorehouse was a hotspot, because everyone enjoys a good leer. A narrow passage with tiny cubicles leading off, each ‘room’ fitted with a concrete shelf and a nude fresco painted over the door. I’d seen a young couple in one of the rooms making those bunny-ears with their hands and grinning, probably on the precise spot where girls and boys were roughly fucked by dozens of men in the course of a single night. I didn’t spend much time there – it had the flavour of walking over graves.

Boniface had been looking thoroughly scorched by the time she shepherded us towards the exit. I’d tried to snatch a few winks on the coach, but anyone who’s ever done that will know it only leaves you feeling irritable, drool-flecked and more tired than when you started.

Coffee. We were in Italy, after all!

All I found was a minimart with one of those self-dispensing, automatic machines. I didn’t even get to try out my smattering of Italian on the pretty boy behind the till. Smooth chest, thick lips.

It might have been from a machine, but the coffee was dark and sweet and damned good – nothing like the watered-down dregs from home. A few minutes of sipping it in the open air and I felt some life dripping back into me. It was quiet here in the late afternoon, fresh and clear despite the narrowness of the street and nearby traffic murmured, a reminder of the timeless metropolis within arm’s reach. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I would dive in. Get through dinner, share a room with the nemesis, then the city would be mine. I’d place my feet on the same stones as those walked on by Caesars. Oswald had hinted there might be a free evening towards the end of the trip – off-the-record-not-to-be-mentioned-to-parents-if-you-know-what-I-mean. Freedom, for one evening. Who knew what might happen?

Then, home, said my mind, planning the future. A few exams, then an uncle had promised me a paltry wage in his bookshop. Then it would be time to pack up and off to George’s College. I’d only been to Cambridge once, for the interviews, but I’d decided it was my sort of town: lush vines framing arched windows, a hundred courtyards and tiny wooden doors polished by history. Immaculate quads, deep leather armchairs and those wide lawns dropping down to the Cam. That single day of interviews had stuck with me. Less traffic than Oxford and less fumes, the spaces seeming more open. Maybe it was just the prospect of somewhere new that tantalised, but to me Cambridge seemed ancient and beautiful and yet alive.

Dinner wasn’t bad, as it turned out. The bespectacled woman who ran the place cared about food in the way all Italians should, because the baskets that dotted the long table were filled with fresh, warm bread, and the pasta and ragù was meaty, wholesome. I didn’t know if it was beef or pork and I didn’t care. After the day we’d had, all were ravenous and even the worst of the idiots kept quiet as they shovelled the stuff into their mouths.

I mopped up my plate and said ‘No, grazie mille’ to the woman as she offered up seconds from an enormous, steaming serving dish. She was big and her hair could have been wound into a fence to keep out intruders, but the look on her face feeding all those boys was one of quiet contentment. For a moment I wondered how many kids of her own she had, if she missed cooking for them. When she smiled at me it was warm. I earned a throaty ‘Prego’.

Easter shot from his seat, struck a pose, and in a cod opera voice sang a drawn-out ‘Nograzymillyeeeee!’

Our hostess’s face resumed its glower.

Easter caught my viperish look and did his usual ‘What?’

‘Stop being a wanker,’ I told him.

‘Says the one sucking up to the locals.’ He did a shitty Marlon Brando, thumb pressed to forefinger and cheeks blown out. ‘Iyaaa lika de pasda, sinyora.’

‘I’m being polite.’

‘You’re being a fucking geek.’ His boyband guffawed to his satisfaction and I knew from the smirk on his face that he didn’t need to be reasonable to win.

My chest felt tight and my fingers clenched and I heard Father telling me Not To Take Any Rubbish, but Easter was bigger than me, had backup, and besides I knew that if I threw a punch now I’d be hauled up in front of the headmaster when we got back; what if that got back to George’s College? Would they take a dim view of prospective students who brawled over pasta? I swallowed hard and looked down at my bowl, drowned by the gleeful triumph emanating from the other side of the table, feeling every titter and snort like a knife in the ribs and hating, hating myself for not just socking him one right there and despising my logical, sensible, coward brain.

A presence behind me, and I was sure it was the hostess back for more and I felt myself turning to lash out at her even though it wasn’t her fault. The sight of brown corduroys and brogues stopped me.

‘Eat up, Easter,’ said Oswald, his brow furrowed. ‘Save the theatrics for the football pitch, eh?’

Easter became sullen, firing a poison look down the table at Fatty Lamb, who’d let out an explosive snort of laughter.

‘Monk,’ he says to me, ‘would you come please?’ He saw my expression, then followed up with, ‘You’re not in trouble, I just have some news. Come on, you look like you’ve finished.’

I stepped out from the bench, feeling eyes on my back and followed Oswald out of the room, past a separate table for two where Boniface sat alone, scanning her phone with a look of pure boredom.

Oswald led me to what might enthusiastically be called a ‘lobby’, a corner by the reception desk big enough for two moth-eaten chairs and a glass table that might once have been clear. There was a fold-scarred copy of Time magazine, the cover a torn Union Jack drowning in heavy seas. ‘La caduta finale dell’impero britannico’, read the headline; remember those days just after the second vote – the world was still reeling from our determination to become hermits? The drawbridge wasn’t up yet, but the chains were being oiled even then. Oswald regained my attention with his cough-splutter and I took the seat his proffered hand suggested.

‘I had some mail from home. From the school, that is,’ he begins. His eyes don’t settle on anything. The two yellowed fingers of his left hand skittered over his brown corduroy knee, absently brushing away imaginary flecks.

‘Sir.’ A fine catch-all of a word for dealing with teachers. An exclamation-confirmation-interrogative and more besides. It seemed to do the trick because he continued.

‘Cambridge have come back with an answer. I have it here, but I haven’t opened the attachment. I thought you might.’ He handed me his phone.

The black screen reflected my eager face. In one corner a minute spider-web crack blossomed, showing the thing’s age. A brown leather cover (what else?) folded underneath. I’d seen a girl in Pompeii earlier that day, twirling her fingers in the air as if casting spells, though likely checking her media feed or calling a friend – the imbed models hadn’t made it to Britain, leaving us a dwindling stock of ancient hand-helds such as this one.

I touched the screen and it whitened. The mail was from the school’s second master, but the text whirled past in a haze of unimportance as I sought the attachment at the bottom and jabbed at it.

Document loading. This is it.

Document loading. They have to admit me. I’ve done the work.

One hurdle down, on to the next. The plan I’d coveted, shaped, polished was like a path stretching in front of me, the first cobble inscribed with the name of George’s College, Cambridge. Study, research, deep archives where I’d rarely see the sun and wouldn’t care. Loud girls in crowded, wooden pubs and quiet smiles from other quiet boys that cut through the noise like black thread on a white cloth. Hiding it, illegal and so exquisite, pretending to the whole world that we’re the closest of chums until we’re alone and lips meet lips and skin brushes skin. Always back to the work, though, whatever subject I’m led to because at the end of it is the star in the crown – the Cambridge Postgraduate Exchange, the only remaining cross-border research programme between Europe and Britain: maligned by the establishment, a politically acid thing that teetered on the brink of extinction every time Parliament drew a breath from riots in the North. A five-year transition period had been announced the day after the results came in, lessons learned after the last debacle, just enough time for me to earn my place, get out from under the eye of what home was becoming. Residency after a few years, followed by citizenship. Goodbye, Old Blighty, and all who sail in you.

Document loaded.

Dear Mr Monk, it read.

The Admissions Committee, together with the Master of Prince George’s College, have convened to review your application to read for a BA in Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek.

My fingers sweated and my brow ached and my eyes didn’t dare blink.

There were a large number of excellent candidates this year, and unfortunately this means that we are unable to offer you a place in the upcoming 2051 semester.

In that instant, I weighed thirty-five stone. I hovered over the mouth of a black hole, the bottom some sickening distance away. My eyes were raw, my hands clenched. Something clattered nearby but I didn’t see it, didn’t care.

‘Here, here, Monk. Careful with that,’ said a voice from a million miles away. I realised I’d dropped his precious phone and he’d scooped it up, running his thumbs over the screen to check for cracks. ‘Well, what did it say, boy?’

‘It…’ my voice barely crawled from under its disgraced rock. ‘It was a no, sir.’

Oswald huffed, still cross about the phone. ‘Well… unlucky.’ He must have seen my face then, bloodless, because his tone mellowed. ‘Lots more places for you to try, good student like you. Exeter, Bristol, my old school, Durham—’

‘I don’t want fucking Durham!’ The words fired out, petulant, the whiny child inside of me taking the opportunity to have charge of my brain while the rest is busy kicking itself to death in a corner.

Oswald’s dry lips made a sort of ‘W’ shape of disgust. ‘Language, Monk, if you please!’

‘Sir,’ I muttered, the rejection searing through my eyes, down every nerve. ‘Sir, I think I’d like to get an early bedtime, if it’s alright with you.’

‘Well, you’ll miss the Neapolitan, but I suppose…’ He waved his hand at the stairs, permitting.

I mumbled a ‘Thank you, sir’ as I stumbled on legs of meringue. He patted me on the arm as I passed, a clumsy conciliation.

‘Chin up, Monk. These things are sent to try us, eh?’

I refrained from picking up the over-flowing, heavy glass ashtray by his side and braining him with it, turning murder into a nod.

Every upwards step was lumpen, a struggle against gravity. Upstairs, I wanted to curl up under my thin blanket and sleep. I wished I was back in the womb, a mass of cells without thought, ambition, or expectations. Instead I just lay there, staring at the wall, Father’s voice telling me to pull myself together, Be A Man About It. I imagined his face when I’d tell him that his only son, already effete and spindly for his liking, a drop-out from the Cadets and terrible at rugger, doesn’t even have the wherewithal to secure a place at his old college. I hated myself for feeling guilty about disappointing him, loathed the base need in me to please a man who had only ever sneered at my achievements. Mother would be a wafting, conciliatory shade who breezed in and said something trite before leaving; she did so hate confrontation.

How had this happened?

I cracked open the single dormitory window, letting in a waft of heated evening Roman air that smelled of cigarettes and gasoline. Through a narrow gap between two pitched roofs I could see just a slither of the Eternal City – I’d visit tomorrow at the tail end of some dull tour party, but now would never call home. The intoxicating flash of tomorrows were twisted beyond recognition; a mockery of a life laid out before me: a second-rate college in a second-rate town where they Don’t Like Your Kind Round Here, watched like a hawk by the local police because people talk. Maybe get a girl pregnant just to fit in and then meaningless, daily toil in some unimportant, vapid job that carried me on its back to retirement, pension, old age and death.

How could they do this to me? Those ancient cunts.

The door banged open. Easter and his goons came bustling in halfway through a joke, their eyes wide and mouths half sneering. They clocked me at once, and that look came to their eyes – the same they’d had that time I woke up with Easter egging one of them on to slap his balls on my chin. I was their prey, struggling with one leg caught in the trap.

‘Jesus, Monk, don’t kill yourself,’ burped one of them.

‘Doesn’t have the stones,’ said Easter.

I moved away from the window and went to my bed. I felt something terrible bubbling under my skin – I needed a book and a quiet place for a few hours. Not here, not now.

‘Don’t ignore me, pansy. What’s wrong with you anyway?’

Leave it, my inner voice pleaded. This feeling inside me was frightening me. I could feel the bonds of control snapping one by one. ‘Piss off, Easter,’ I said to an answering chorus of Ooooooooh.

‘That’s not very nice is it? What’s got you so testy?’

I rummaged in my bag, looking for something to distract me. My brow felt hot and my skin tighter than a drum. Behind, I felt the jackals gather for more blood.

‘You need to relax, you’ll do yourself a mischief,’ said Easter. His voice was vulpine.

This feeling: I knew its cousin well, the anger that sits and smoulders when they taunted and called me bender and geekand loser. It was like that, but wilder and boundless and hungry. I didn’t know what it would do if it got out and for the first time in my life I prayed, a wordless, directionless entreaty to the universe just to make it stop, make them go away just long enough for me to catch my breath.

‘Maybe this will help you unwind!’ said Easter, and whipped the blanket off my bed with a flourish.

The universe turned, looked me in the eye and gave me the finger.

It was an old magazine, torn at the spine and curling. A smooth man with bronzed skin and sculpted shoulders stared out with glassy eyes. The bulge in his white shorts was enormous. The text was Italian; they must have found it on the top shelf of a news kiosk or something.

‘Well, look what we have here!’ chimed in one of the chorus, playing his part.

‘Nice literature you have there, Monk…’

‘Need any help turning the pages? Not sure your wrists’ll be up to it…’

‘I’d stay clear; you might catch something from him…’

Somewhere in my head was the usual me, the one who could ignore them, but he was buried too deep; I couldn’t move my mouth to speak, my jaw locked tight as I stared down at the man candy on the magazine. Easter hadn’t said a thing (didn’t need to), content to watch his followers pick chunks off me. I looked at him. He looked back. He knew I was beaten and moved in for the kill.

‘Come on, Monky-boy,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and trying to stick it down my trousers. ‘You’re so tense, maybe a little wank will mellow you out.’

I pushed him away but it was weak; he cupped me, stopping me from pulling away with a forearm around the back of my neck. ‘C’mon now. Nice slick bumboy like that. Get you hard, does it? They’re all like you here, you know?’

I pushed again but he was the captain of the 2nd XV and so much stronger. Gods, the smell of his hot breath. They were cheering him on, chanting and hooting like they were watching a show.

‘Shame you won’t make it back, eh?’ he whispered in my ear, giving my cock a squeeze.

I don’t know how he knew. Maybe he overheard, maybe one of his bitches.

It was too much.

I smashed my forehead into his nose. He didn’t let go so I did it again, hearing it crunch, and felt wetness. He coiled to retaliate but something had snapped and I was out of control, hitting him with everything I had, teeth bared, screaming at the top of my lungs. He might still have had me but he tripped on something and fell backwards, his head smacking a side table. I followed with my full weight behind knees, elbows, fists. He tried to ball but I hammered him again and again and again. It was so sudden that none of them tried to stop me.

He was wet-wheezing when I came to myself. Blood on him, blood on my hands. The others had stepped back, appalled and the silence was an iron weight. It could only have lasted a few seconds but I’d shattered something, reversed some fundamental law of their universe. Easter’s breath was a rattle, choked with fluid, and bruises were already flowering all over his face and neck. One eye was nothing more than a bloody ruin, the other stared at me, white with primal terror. Gods, there was so much red.

I’ve killed him.

I sprinted for the door through molasses-thick silence. In my haste I slammed into someone, hard; it was you and you were hurt, more blood on me and streaming from your poor nose. Gods, the look of fear in your eyes almost stopped me, almost, but I was already moving fast, out onto the landing, down the stairs. The woman with the wild hair was behind the reception desk and I think she said something to me as I came rushing past. I was already out of the front door and down the side alley by the time I heard Boniface’s reedy call.

Outside, the street was quiet and littered with parked scooters and vans. I looked one way, then the other. From my left I felt the call of the city, heard its traffic moan and its lungs exhale. The raw flesh of my bloodied knuckles screamed at me and I was off, not knowing where I’d go or what I’d do, wanting Rome to swallow me whole.

* * *

For a while, the walls and streets were blurred nothings, a labyrinth without boundary or form. At one point a car beeped at me and I jumped out of the way, clattering into a cluster of chained bicycles, leaving me with oil stains on the bottoms of my trousers. The car – a taxi that barely fit down this little side street – roared past with a cazzo! thrown in my direction and something about that insult, combined with the harsh exhaust fumes, brought me to my senses. I fished my cigarettes from my pocket and lit one, feeling the welcome scrape of the smoke across my throat, scouring my insides.

Did I kill him?

I think I killed him.

My hands shook, making the tip of the cigarette dance. For the first time I realised how dark it was here – no stars above, just a warm glow where the dome of the city’s light blanketed the sky. I took another drag.

I needed somewhere to think. I was on the run, and I could do anything I wanted, go anywhere. An odd-won kind of freedom. The butt hissed in a puddle before dying and I was on my way again. The dark street became a wider dark street, which joined on to another even larger. There were signs of life now, and pavement. Passers-by ambled: couples, families, friends out to enjoy the mild night air.

A restaurant had sprouted an awning that straddled the pavement. As I walked through the warm tunnel, diners either side of me going about their lives, a waiter gave me an eyebrow and I was swamped with herbs, butter and garlic, then the sweetness of cooked meat flooded my mouth with saliva. On any other night I would have taken a table and stayed there until dawn if they’d let me, soaking it all up, but I needed something else, somewhere quiet. I left that temple of noise and company behind.

There was something big ahead – I could feel it all around me, an expectation of mass that drew me onwards. The street split like a fork around an island of parked bicycles and scooters, so tightly packed they could have been a sculpture. On the second floor of a purple neon-lit building a club thumped with a deep bass heartbeat; two slender boys stood outside and laughed. One took a drag on a silver cylinder and puffed great gouts of vapour like a storybook dragon, his eyes alive with the light of the streetlamps. Above their heads the rainbow flag, illuminated, colours stark against the night. Back home I’d only seen it on television, being waved at the heart of a milling sea of angry-sad faces just before the horses charged and the tear gas popped and the shield-walls went boom-boom-boom, heavy boots and visored faces kettling the protesters closer together so the ones in the middle dropped to their knees, unable to breathe. ‘Victory over the perverts’, said one paper the next day. I remembered how sick I’d felt then, bile sitting like a stone under my heart, wondering if that would happen to me.

The two boys joked and fired rapid Italian, heedless. One brushed a hand against the other’s arm, a touch of easy friendship; a girl with a nose ring joined them and there were kisses, then I had to stop watching because then it would look like I was watching.

When I turned my face away, there it was. The sight hit me in the face: a mass of stone, concrete, marble, pillar upon pillar upon pillar that curved away from me, up-lights dotting the ground and stretching their warm glow upwards, other lights inside making the whole structure look like a giant’s oven. Thousands had died in this place but it beckoned like a beacon. The Colosseum – being restored at titanic expense – through a trick of ancient engineering managed to both squat and soar all at once.

The in-flight magazine had had an article about this, the efforts of the dying European Union to centralise by moving its capital to Rome, spending hundreds of millions on restoring this totemic symbol of Empire, drafting in legions of archaeologists, historians, stonemasons and engineers. They were cladding ancient stone and brick in super-hard transparent film while constructing a delicate but strong inner framework – hidden from view – that supported the ultra-modern interior. It was some months from opening but already it shone into the night, fences and gates carefully placed so as not to obscure the structure. You remember how our press was all over this extravagance, comparing it to the last gasp of a hypothermic body drawing heat to its core, leaving its limbs to die. They knew, though, those Euros, even as they struggled to hold their heads up, how powerful this symbol could be – a place of death that now hosted the theatre of life.

I stood for a while, soaking it in. A few construction vehicles were parked around the exterior but it looked almost finished. I wasn’t the only one watching – I caught flashes of implant cameras – the clunky, early ones, not like what they have today – and a few doors down a couple with a young child in a pushchair licked precarious ice creams under streetlamps like it was the middle of the day; the man pointed out something to the woman, who nodded and leaned in close with a smile the evening couldn’t mask.

That ugly fucking gash cut through the ancient heart of the city by Mussolini, without regard for aesthetics or what was buried beneath, had lately been dug up. The asphalt and concrete was gone and the teams of a dozen universities had swarmed, ravenous for fresh finds; their dig sites were neat rows of tents and awnings covering the excavations from any rogue showers. Thirty feet above it all, arched and glassed and chromed, a skybridge followed the path of the former avenue, linking the Colosseum to that enduringly absurd pile, the Vittorio Emanuele monument. I took one of the four covered escalators up to the bridge and the travellators that ran day and night carried me, new rubber squeaking, towards the bustle of town on new, barely marked steel plates.

I didn’t have a map, but I’d studied these streets enough to have a rough idea of where I was. I was drawn towards the place Keats had whimpered his last, but broke off before I hit the tourist traps. There were endless warrens of streets here, punctuated by piazzas where the tables of cafés and restaurants spread out like extensions of the creepers that criss-crossed the walls. When I thought I was far enough from the chatter I dropped into a chair and nodded at a waiter, giving him my best grazie as he offered a laminated menu. It’s a wonder the chair didn’t buckle under me.

My feet had led me to a kind of womb within the city. The buzz of a legion of tourists, performers, shopkeepers, thieves and motorists pulsed just out of reach, a noise-cocoon that reassured rather than overwhelmed.

Wine wouldn’t be a problem, though I looked my age: this was Europe where it was a right, not a privilege. The waiter frowned when I asked for a carafe – a trick I’d read about – and asked in better English than I expected whether I’d prefer a bottle.

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘A carafe. Rosso.’

He scowled, but went to get it. Fuck him, he’d no idea of the day I’d had.

The wine went down easy. I’d snuck a bit from Father’s cellar in the past but he was into his oaked French – this was dark cherry on my tongue. I wanted to sort through my mind, to find some kind of order in the chaos, form a plan, but I couldn’t. Every time I started formulating some kind of pathway, some way of dragging myself out of the mire of a future I had before me, all I got was a screaming chorus of harpies.

Failure. Loser. Queer.

An ancient column skewered the piazza. It was styled like Trajan’s, though I couldn’t remember the name of this one. Bands of soldiers and merchants and magistrates and royalty tramped up the spiral that wound from base to tip, always facing forwards. What I wouldn’t have given to be one of them, with just a single path to follow.

I finished the carafe. He brought me another. I gave him a look that told him I was there for the duration.

The column was engraved on the base but I couldn’t make it out from my table. Carafe in hand, not bothering with the glass, I walked over to it. My cheeks were flushed and my eyes couldn’t settle on the neat ranks of bars that some chisel had put there two millennia ago. I knew I was pissed because I’d been deciphering worse engravings without breaking a mental sweat since the fourth form.

‘Hey! You, come back!’ It was the waiter, shouting at me from under the awning. A couple mid-dinner gave me a shitty look. I wandered back to my table and chugged the carafe, not caring when a rivulet meandered down my chin and plopped onto my lap.

A hand slapped the table, and under it a piece of paper.

‘Didn’t ask for the bill,’ I said, finding it harder than I should. They’d always said I was a lightweight. The harpies returned.

‘You have finished, I think,’ said the waiter. He had dark locks and stubble that joined a patch of darker, curlier hair at the ‘V’ of his shirt. He looked pissed off.

‘One more, then I’m gone.’

‘Pay and go.’

‘More fucking wine!’

I was pulled to my feet before I knew what had happened. He had manifested a partner from nowhere and I was already halfway across the piazza, too surprised to lash them with anything.

‘Please,’ I choked, unable to hold tears back. The harpies laughed and called me a baby, poor little baby queerboy, crying in public. They took the money I threw at them and in return dumped me in a side street. I called them wankers, received a vaffanculo, pezzo di merda inglese.

Have you noticed how many still speak Italian in the restaurants? Even though the menus are all in Latin and even with all those translators they gave out, the old ways stick around.

The wine was pumping up the veins beneath my skin and my feet were moving. I thought of columns, Trajan’s Column, and I saw plastered walls and cobbles pass by, heard the tinny meep of scooters, and incense and old dust crawled up my nose. I passed a shop filled with wooden toys but one of them, a Guignol with a razor smile, grinned at me in a way that was far too personal.

Then I was there, standing in front of Trajan’s Column. I’d gone back on myself, returning to where the skybridge dropped me. I stared up at the floodlit stone, feeling the weight of it as it thrust into the night sky. I was drunk and I was lost and I needed to lash out.