Now Am I In Arden
A story by Ivor Sukwell and Kyle McKenzie. A story about a boy and a man with all that such entails. The setting is modern and based around the theatre, Not your thing? Sorry about that, we're sure you'll find something that is. Whatever your choice, please remember Nifty needs your donations.
Now Am I In Arden
Chapter fifteen
Every night I watched Equus; five nights a week for six weeks. Thirty times I watched my Brat become Alan Strang, or was it that I watched Alan Strang become my Brat?
I watched him occasionally be good, mostly brilliant, and three times, simply sublime. Thirty times I watched him despairingly drive a spike into the eyes of horses that were not horses, but two-legged creatures wearing oversized wicker masks to show they were both horse and man. Thirty times I saw the darkness in his soul as he tried to blind the demon or demons that watched his every move.
Twenty seven of those times the audience gasped in shock and horror, even wept in many seats; and after those twenty seven performances, Brat went home to his mother.
The other three times, the times when Brat went beyond simple brilliance, the audience did not gasp in shock and horror and not one single person wept. All sat, stunned into silence by the intensity of what they witnessed, and on those three times Brat did not go home to his mother.
He came instead, in silence, the fifty or so miles to Arden House in the Berkshire countryside, a countryside almost packed with the finest bloodstock, and led me, still wordless, down to the basement, where, in silence still, he undressed, picked up that wicked, wicked cane, handed it to me and placed himself in front of the frame, waiting to be tied, gagged and hurt.
I knew what he wanted, knew why he wanted it, and knew as well that what he wanted was impossible.
No matter how hard you hit, no matter what pain you cause, you cannot beat innocence back into a boy whose innocence has been lost.
All three of those times I fastened him to the frame, arms and legs spread, and all three times before I put the gag in his mouth I waited for him to tell me what I knew he needed. He never did. He knew I could not use that cane unless he told me to. And, of course, he could not tell me to. Tomorrow he would be on stage again.
I held out my hands and reluctantly Mr Williams picked up the rope and bound them together. He knew what was coming, fussed over the tying of the knots to delay it, but I wouldn't let him off.
Equus had closed the day before. Thirty performances had been hard, easily the hardest thing I had done in my life, thirty times having to go into the darkest place I could imagine and face that darkness.
After the first week I wasn't sure I could continue, but something in me made me see it through. I was terrified of that darkness, but I knew I had to go there and not just confront it but draw on it, and I knew that by drawing on that darkness I was giving a special performance.
By the end of the run tickets were changing hands for thousands, as people flocked to see what was being called the show of the decade. Mum came to see it once, told me I was amazing but explained she couldn't watch it again. It was too hard to see me like that, pretence or not, and I couldn't blame her. A few times those in the front row recoiled from me as I came out to take a bow at the end, as if terrified that I was still Strang and that they too would be blinded.
"No excuses now," I told him in his basement `play room', "no saying you can't mark me as people will see when I perform. You know what you need to do." I knew that was hard on him, the hurt in his eyes afterwards and the look of guilt at what he had done, but the horse which watched me still had eyes and the cane hanging from the wall of his basement was my spike.
"Bum, legs or both?" I asked as coldly as I could. I knew he needed to be hurt, really hurt. I didn't know why, but I knew it and knew that I had to hurt him because I loved him.
It wasn't just hurting him, though, was it? It would hurt me as well. Not physically, of course, but mentally. While that cane may help to drive away some of the darkness that had enveloped my Brat, it would only drive it from him and into me.
Three times during the run he had asked for it and three times I'd had to refuse. He couldn't go on stage covered in cane welts, but, as he said, now there was no excuse for me to hide behind.
"Legs or bum?" I repeated as I fastened him to the frame.
"Both," I told him simply, and saw the hurt in his eyes. One would have been hard for him, would have made him feel terrible, but both would wound him deeply.
But he had made this place and he had helped bring us both here, and the cane was his punishment as much as it was mine.
"If you don't do it properly I'll want you to do it again," I warned him, in case his nerve failed.
"How many?" I was, I knew I was, trying to delay things, a futile hope that he'd change his mind, wouldn't need the pain to fight his darkness.
"That's for you to decide," I was twisting the knife now, making him an active participant in this rather than a soldier who could claim he was 'just following orders'.
"You have to give me the beating I deserve," I told him simply. "And no bullshit that I don't deserve any."
"But why, Jacob?" I never called him Jacob, but this wasn't my Brat, was it? This was a boy I didn't know. Oh, I knew well enough he found a little pain a lot of a thrill, but a serious whipping?
"You know," I told him coldly, opening my mouth for the gag. That was easier than explaining, anything was easier than what Steve had told me to do and the whipping would remove the need for me to think about it.
For a time at least anyway.
And so I hit him.
Hard.
Across the outside of his left thigh.
His wonderful body contorted, a muffled howl came though the gag in his mouth.
One was never going to be enough.
Three times I struck each leg.
Six times his body writhed and twisted and six howls came.
Enough. That had to be enough.
Carefully I took the gag out of his mouth so he could suck in air. Do something to fight the pain of those six evil slashes.
"Bum now," I panted, the tears running down my face.
"You can't take any more," I protested, my tears matching his.
"Bum now," I repeated. My thighs hurt so much, he had laid the cane on hard and I could see how much that had hurt him but he needed to be punished as much as I did.
"Oh Brat," I sobbed, "What have I done to you that deserves this?"
That it must be something to do with me I partly understood. Was it for getting him to do Strang? Search out the darkness in him that would let him become Strang?
I could think of no other reason.
"I love you, Brat," I pleaded.
"I know you do," I told him sadly, "you love me too much and that's the problem." I was crying now, sobbing not just because of the pain in my thighs but because of how much my heart hurt.
"If that's all it is, it's easily cured," I said nonsensically. "I'll go away, leave you to be who you want to be and not who I want you to be. I'll set you free, my Brat. Anything but this."
I waved the cane feebly, never wanting to even hold it again.
"That's worse, don't you understand?" How could he not see it, how could he pretend he didn't know what he had done to me?
"You've trapped me," I sobbed.
"I can't be the boy you need and I can't leave and let you become that loveless cold ghost again." The sobs were harder now, the cane breaking the last of my inhibitions.
Trapped him? What did he mean? That I made him wear that ring perhaps? On that finger?
I tried to remove it, take it from him so he would no longer feel somehow bound to me.
But when I did, he screamed.
"You Can't! You Can't!" I thrashed in my bonds, the Strang look on my face.
"Then what, my love?" Lost I was and not a landmark to guide me.
"You are the boy I want," the words were desperate, "The only boy I want. The only boy I will ever want!"
"But I'm not a boy anymore am I? And you wouldn't fuck me when I was a boy so what hope is there for me now?" I twisted in the ropes again, it was a good thing he had tied me securely otherwise we might have started fighting.
"WHAT?!!!!!" I dropped the cane in shock. "This is all because I never did that?" How could that be possible? Always we had done only what Brat asked for, always but the once when I had spanked him and asked him to fuck me as, in my feeble mind, a sort of demonstration that he liked me enough to do that.
"I never ever thought you wanted that."
And that was about as feeble and pathetic as anything could be.
Foolish, fond old man - no doubt about that.
Blind old man as well. No doubt of that either now.
I had failed my Brat, failed him by never doing what he wanted me to do. I'd never, as the polite way of putting things goes, taken advantage of him, and that is exactly what he'd wanted me to do.
"Don't lie!" I was furious and twisted in my bonds.
"You kept me a virgin to keep me your perfect boy forever, to keep me for yourself and stop me ever being with anyone else!"
When emotional argument starts, reason goes and things are said that should never be said. Or are they?
"Don't be stupid," I fumed. "I expected you to fuck and be fucked by Gino. Hoped you would be, if you must know!
I spent three months imagining you in bed with Kasper whatever his fucking name is; imagined him fucking you senseless every night. You giving him what you couldn't bring yourself to give me! And why should you? I'm just a stupid old man, not what a boy wants in his bed!"
"I gave you everything!" I fumed, twisting violently in the ropes.
"I couldn't fuck Gino because I'm yours and you're always watching me, couldn't suck Kasper or Steve however much I wanted to because I'm your boy!"
I twisted more but there was no give in the ropes. "I couldn't even get hard for Gino and I loved him! Couldn't get hard because all I could think of was you and how you couldn't live without me as your virgin boy. And that's how you kept me isn't it? Like one of those statues you like, something you can look at and admire because it's perfect!"
"You did give me everything, you gave me a life," sad now, not angry anymore. "And I do look at you and admire you because, to me, you are perfect. But never did I want to do those things to you. Never thought I was doing those things."
The humiliation of my Brat not being able to get hard when he needed and wanted to must have been too much for him to bear. That I did understand.
"But I never 'watched' you," I pathetically attempted to explain, "Never, ever wanted you to stay a virgin as you put it. Do it with a boy, yes, I wanted that for you. I'd have been so happy if you had. Less happy if it was a man, that I do admit, but I would still have loved you, even then."
I hung there, trying to convince myself he was lying but knowing it was true.
"So it was all in my head," I said sadly, thinking how I had missed out on losing my virginity to Gino a boy who I had loved like a brother, and a line from the Merchant of Venice slipped into my head and out of my mouth:
"But
love is blind, and lovers cannot see,
The petty follies that themselves commit."
"And
men have died from time to time, but not
For love."
I gave back As You to his Merchant and gently undid the ropes that bound him.
I put the anaesthetic on his welts and he didn't complain. I led him from the basement to the lounge and he didn't complain. I poured him a drink and he didn't complain.
"Love you, Jacob Brat," I said and meant it, "And for all the hurt I have given you I am most grievously sorry."
"Love you too Mr Williams," I told him, "love you more than I can ever say." We sat for a long time in silence, me in his lap and his arms gently wrapped around me.
"Some of the hurt you gave and some I gave myself," I told him eventually, "and time hurt me most of all. But if I could go back and change my life I would still walk in your door and pour my madness in your ear like Puck once did."
"And if that happened it would still have been my eyes you were trying to stab out, wouldn't it?" Understanding dawns very slowly at times.
I read him Wordsworth's 'Intimations of Immortality from Early Childhood'. Not all of it, we only had one life after all. But the bit about shades of the prison house beginning to close upon the growing boy, and he understood perfectly what that meant.
I sat in his lap as he read the poem, his voice lifting and lilting with the words in that way he could do without trying as if they flowed through him rather from the page.
"What will happen when the shades close?" I asked him, safe in his lap.
"We rage against the dying of the light, and we will rage together."
`Lente, lente curite noctis equi,' I cried and Jacob Brat wept, in his lonely bed and in mine as well, but still those horses of the night ran on, their relentless pace undiminished. Each night still passed and a new day came, and with each new day my Brat grew a day older, and each day he was with me he railed against the dying of the light as the prison house shades closed in upon him.
He was going to stay a boy for as long as time would allow him.